As someone who is neither Chinese nor American and has no horse in this race, I find it amusing how strong the bias against China is on this site. TikTok accesses clipboard, it must be an intelligence operation; LinkedIn and AirBnB do the same, I guess the devs were lazy and didn't do enough testing. Someone find a security hole in a Huawei device, that must be a communist backdoor; a Cisco device has the same security issue, they are just moving fast and breaking things.
You know the old saying that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions. If you cut someone off while driving, it's just a simple error and no biggie, you just misjudged the road situation momentarily; but if someone cuts you off, they are a idiot who should not be on the road and deserves to get their license taken away and their car impounded.
The reaction to anything China on HN is like the above, applied at a national scale.
Wrong or right, many Americans see China as an enemy. News is filtered through that light. And some news, like convictions about IP theft by Chinese (Xu at IBM, 3 individuals at Sinovel, etc, etc, etc), leave little room for debate. These stories color the ones which may or may not be nefarious like TikTok. Guilt by association.
But they are very selective in doing that. Even when the same actions are done in the same context they will use different measures for different people based on their sentiment toward them. And that just adds to the bias and fuels the cycle. As explained by this simple but accurate picture [0]. They see China and and their hackers as enemies. Do you think they see the NSA and by extension their own country as an enemy? Discarding (unwittingly) half of the context makes it a lot easier to assume they have the moral high ground.
Propaganda doesn't mean it's a lie, just that you take the same truth and shape it into an opinion for the people, depending on what you want to achieve. And it's a tool used by every superpower.
You know the old saying that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions. If you cut someone off while driving, it's just a simple error and no biggie, you just misjudged the road situation momentarily; but if someone cuts you off, they are a idiot who should not be on the road and deserves to get their license taken away and their car impounded.
The reaction to anything China on HN is like the above, applied at a national scale.