TikTok continues to be Chinese spyware. It also continues to be an increasing point of vulnerability for China to put its thumb on American culture, politics and opinion.
As long as it’s legal for anyone to be a data broker and sell out a lot of data about the American population to anyone willing to pay the price, which includes China, shutting it down for being spyware makes little sense.
If you truly care about data not reaching China you need GDPR-type data privacy legislation and enforce that legislation.
One, continued demands that we ‘prove’ that China or ByteDance has its finger on the scale. I say that the information elsewhere in this post, in the absence of counterexamples, is very strong evidence. At minimum, they are fixing content balance issues they dislike and allowing those they like, with an algorithm that snowballs.
TikTok banned discussion of Bin Ladin’s letter not because the CCP disliked it but because the US national security establishment disliked the letter. The same is true for them banning Glenn Greenwald.
While they might change their content moderation policies in the future in the moment those decisions are made to appear nonthreatening.
I am sympathetic to ‘rushed’ objections when bills are so long there is no time to read and understand them. This does not seem to be one of those cases.
If you think you understand the implications, which other popular social media company is partly under Chinese control and thus targeted by the bill if the government would argue that it violates national security concerns?
Tencent owns around 38% of Discord’s shares.
This law makes it easy to pressure Discord to do whatever the White House wants them to do by threatening to ban them otherwise.
Tencent has a 40% stake in Epic Games. Given that Epic Games is working on their own app store, being able to pressure them to censor apps is likely of interest.
As long as it’s legal for anyone to be a data broker and sell out a lot of data about the American population to anyone willing to pay the price, which includes China, shutting it down for being spyware makes little sense.
If you truly care about data not reaching China you need GDPR-type data privacy legislation and enforce that legislation.
TikTok banned discussion of Bin Ladin’s letter not because the CCP disliked it but because the US national security establishment disliked the letter. The same is true for them banning Glenn Greenwald.
While they might change their content moderation policies in the future in the moment those decisions are made to appear nonthreatening.
If you think you understand the implications, which other popular social media company is partly under Chinese control and thus targeted by the bill if the government would argue that it violates national security concerns?
Tencent owns around 38% of Discord’s shares.
This law makes it easy to pressure Discord to do whatever the White House wants them to do by threatening to ban them otherwise.
Other important companies that are affected:
Riot Games is 100% owned by Tencent.
Tencent has a 40% stake in Epic Games. Given that Epic Games is working on their own app store, being able to pressure them to censor apps is likely of interest.