zlacker

>>el_dud+(OP)
The US is forcing its tourists to give away a list of all their social media accounts and all their email accounts. If you're a foreign journalist writing pseudonymously for your safety, you must now share that information with the US government to enter the country. This isn't quite on the level of forcing people to install malware on their phone yet, but give it a couple years.

>>murbar+04
> The US ...

This style of argument is deflection, and it gets us nowhere.

It's very effective in redirecting the focus away from one bad actor and onto another bad actor, though.

>>panark+ph
Call it what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

>>bduers+no
Can you explain what's wrong with whataboutism?

>>theslu+Do
Sure, several things:

It is basically changing the topic when you have no effective rebuttal to an argument/issue.

It also creates a false equivalence between the real issue and the "whatabout" issue.

In this case, GP has no answer to China going FAR beyond any reasonable measure by requiring any tourist to install spyware on their phone so they can access all private conversations, so GP wants to ignore that and talk about public info the US requires visitors disclose at the border.

The false equivalence is created by treating as parallel and roughly equivalent govt actions the requirement to install spyware vs divulging of SocMed accts.

I'm NOT saying that divulging SocMed accts could be a definite threat to a variety of classes of people, especially journalists writing undercover. But even for that specific example, which is worse, enumerating your public SocMed accounts, or installing spyware on your phone, which will divulge far more? Not even in the same ballpark.

In sum, Whataboutism is not only damaging the conversation, it can often also be a method of disingenuous argument.