China hiding exploits it find has a large jmpace on Us policy. Should the Us reveal every zero day it knows, in a theoretical conflict with china China will have zero days US didnt know about but the US will have none.
Then the counterargument to "the US shouldn't be hiding exploits it knows" isn't "but China does it too", it's "actually the US should be doing exactly that because it's in its best interest".
Or there's some game theory and empirically tested amount of potential for violence (even cyber kind) that one should reserve because of human's tendency to be shitty when they can.
That would be true if it was just China, but when it's so many countries that it's essentially an international norm, the "whataboutism" charge loses some of its sting.
"But other countries do it too" is whataboutism, no matter how many other countries that is; it doesn't invalidate the criticism no matter the number. So I ask again: is the real counterargument that actually this is perfectly fine to do?
Whether something is acceptable depends very heavily on cultural norms. If lots of people do it without condemnation, that is compelling evidence there is a cultural norm which accepts it. That's a cromulent argument.
For example, when someone accuses you of taking money out of the register, it would be an example of whataboutism to point that the person accusing you does it too. The X in "what about X?" doesn't need to be something fundamentally different, it just needs to be something that distracts from the original criticism.
If the real argument is that not disclosing vulnerabilities is not actually a bad thing, then the fact that China also doesn't do it is completely irrelevant.
> For example, when someone accuses you of taking money out of the register, it would be an example of whataboutism to point that the person accusing you does it too.
I don't think it would. Or at least, I don't think it necessarily would. "You do it, therefore it's not bad, therefore I'm not wrong" is a reasonable argument that is not distraction. "All these other people also do it and it is treated as de minimis at worst, and yet you're singling me out for inappropriate reasons" may be reasonable depending on context or may be somewhat abusive... but it is a different argument than "Whataboutism". Bringing up that you do it, too, purely (or mainly?) as a distraction can probably reasonably be accounted Whataboutism, but it's a distractingly noncentral example because of its proximity to those other arguments.
> If the real argument is that not disclosing vulnerabilities is not actually a bad thing, then the fact that China also doesn't do it is completely irrelevant.
Other agents having made the same decision is perhaps some evidence that it was a reasonable decision, although it very much depends on context.
