Apparently bleating about Tik Tok is all this government can do to try and hide the fact that it’s been bleating about Tik Tok for months and not achieved anything besides having increased the deficit with China to record numbers while still paying Midwest farmers tens of billions for that privilege.<p>It’s also failed to actually do anything about Tik Tok for months despite having committed some blatantly illegal acts that have reduced the government to little more than a PRC style ruling party. I guess actually solving the stated Tik Tok problem would prevent the daily headlines that are distracting from those same record deficits.
As a Chinese, I'm pretty sure it is the case. TikTok has a lot of content. Chinese government can be selective which to "monetize" - and generally they good for both government and TikTok. When you can control what people see, what people post, you control the people. Politicians' wet dream comes true.
One of the claims I’ve read about is that there’s fear that Beijing could use TikTok to “brainwash kids”, which I thought was a crazy thought...until I read about how the FDA had to issue a warning begging kids not to do the “Benadryl challenge” they saw on TikTok because it was sending them to the ER.
I find this quite strange and short sighted.<p>I see my kids look at TikTok all the time. I don't really see how you could spread propaganda through 5 second dances and jokes. Especially since peers are doing that.<p>I would think the Party influence on Hollywood and other entertainment such as Computer Games would be way more disturbing. Injecting propaganda into a real story seems way more effective. Especially when you fully control the medium.
Tiktok/ByteDance was interviewing pretty furiously in the Bay Area last year. All around I heard good things about the process.<p>An interesting thing about their interview process is that they often required a night time slot for at least one round.<p>This was because many teams had their direct manager or VP in mainland PRC, which has a 15 time hour difference.
I’ve seen plenty of U.S. military personnel posting TikTok videos while browsing the app. Many of them are casually posting their experiences of reserve duty life but I’ve seen a couple taken from outposts in Syria.<p>Why is this tolerated if the U.S. Gov has major concerns about the PRC’s having access to TikTok’s data?
The irony of this entire shitshow is TikTok was skewered for not being open enough to political content in the west, leading to regional moderation changes that made politics and risk of influence possible on the platform. If TikTok was allowed to operate like Douyin in China - largely apolitical - then much of current worries could have been averted. Chinese style censorship can be useful and complementary to existing partisan platforms. Sometimes you want an apolitical space for impressionable demographics. Overall I still find TikTok pushes less politics to my feed for my interests.<p>I'm anticipating a future where foreign platforms like TikTok are just webapps and can't be banned without implementing great firewall. What will countries do then.
If it happened long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it is more like the satellite released by the Soviet Union. They can do something that the USA cannot.<p>The trouble is it is a) a networked world and hence this is not just radio it sent and b) it is one sided as any innovation can be profited by non-Chinese in Chinese man unless the ultimate winner is China.<p>Big trouble and how it struggled or lost to China is details. Not sure it can win. I will pray it can. Just so one sided how can it win. WHO, UN, WTO, IP ... in fact it is not the wake up call from Hong Kong. But it might be too late.
Any insight as to why they would back up to some place like Singapore instead of just some other datacenter in the USA? Seems inefficient and likely a loophole for CCP to easily get access to it. Pull up a mobile datacenter and dump it on 18-wheeler-net and then ship that back on a slow boat to China
> ByteDance has had a party committee since 2017 and is headed by CCP secretary and company editor-in-chief Zhang Fuping (張輔評), reported Human Rights Watch. Members of the committee hold regular gatherings at which they study speeches by Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) and "pledge to follow the party in technological innovation."<p>> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.<p><a href="https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3982027" rel="nofollow">https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3982027</a>
The evidence that TikTok is a mouthpiece for China, according to NPR's account of the Commerce Department memo (I still need to read it myself):<p>1. Bytedance employs 130 Party members.<p>2. The party members had a rally with Communist salutes and pledges and such.<p>3. Bytedance's CEO once apologized over an app that the authorities shut down because, as far as I can tell, the memes were too dank.<p>The first two are normal for big Chinese companies, though I suppose one could say that just means all Chinese companies are propaganda outlets. The third one...yes, if authorities go after a company in any country you will generally see leadership either challenge the decision or apologize, this isn't even unique to authoritarian countries. In other words this sounds like generic natsec scare tactics where you could insert the name of any Chinese corporation rather than anything interesting.
"The Trump administration, however, did not offer any direct evidence that TikTok's U.S. data has ever been assessed by Beijing officials."
The US government- Trump plus his cabinet- consists of nut cases who make up stuff for imaginary enemies. Perhaps this will stimulate college students who notoriously do not vote to get out and vote for their lifestyles.
The whole ban is so gross. It's clearly politically targeted to deplatform Trump critics all while firing people up about China.<p>For those that aren't familiar. TikTok is pretty ubiquitous in the under 21 crowd while being practically unused by older people. It's sort of like when young people fled to Twitter and Instagram to get away from their parents on Facebook. It's basically the next Twitter for that age group.<p>TikTok (the community, not the company) is also quite critical of Trump. For instance, the buying up of rally tickets a few months ago so he would show up to an empty political event was organized on TikTok and we know that it pissed Trump off [1].<p>That level of age and political specificity in their audience makes it easy to target them for their ideas.<p>This type of laser focused ban on specific conpanies (rather than, say, disallowing data to be stored in China or banning Chinese owned companies from operating) reveals the nakedly political motivation behind this action. "China is bad" is just the excuse here. It's really about banning a popular meetingplace for a political demographic opposed to Trump.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...</a>