Self-defense against TikTok is “hegemonic,” according to the Chinese foreign ministry.
On Wednesday, before the vote to sever or ban TikTok passed the U.S. House, The New York Times reported on the unhappiness of Wang Wenbin (shown above), one of the spokesmen for China’s foreign ministry (“China Condemns U.S. Proposal to Force the Sale of TikTok,” March 13, 2024).
“In recent years, though the United States has never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to U.S. national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok,” said Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, during a daily press briefing….
Mr. Wang accused Washington of “resorting to hegemonic moves when one could not succeed in fair competition.”
The scrutiny of TikTok disrupted global business, sowed investor distrust in the United States, and would “eventually backfire on the U.S. itself,” he said….
Last year, Beijing said it would firmly oppose the forced sale of the platform hours before TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, testified before Congress. China’s commerce ministry said at the time that the Chinese government would need to sign off on any such sale.
China could shoot you in the heart while protesting that you’ve yet to show that it is aiming a gun at you and pulling the trigger.
MARCH 21, 2024 UPDATE: It seems that the legislation that just passed the U.S. House is just as sweeping an assault on freedom of speech—certainly not directed solely at TikTok—as a previous legislative attempt. I should have said more about the details of the legislation in this and a related post.
See Matt Taibbi’s Racket News article “Why the TikTok Ban is So Dangerous: Did they tell you the part about giving the president sweeping new powers?” (March 15, 2024).
Taibbi says:
As written, any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States” is covered.
Currently, the definition of “foreign adversary” includes Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China.
The definition of “controlled,” meanwhile, turns out to be a word salad, applying to “(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country; (B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or (C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B).”
A “foreign adversary controlled application,” in other words, can be any company founded or run by someone living at the wrong foreign address, or containing a small minority ownership stake. Or it can be any company run by someone “subject to the direction” of either of those entities. Or, it’s anything the president says it is. Vague enough?
Yes, more than vague enough.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.com: “U.S. House Acts to Thwart CCP Weapon TikTok”
“Reasons that lawmakers and others support the bill include the fact that Chinese businesses like ByteDance are not permitted to function in splendid isolation from the Chinese Communist Party; the CCP’s interest in stealing data, of which ByteDance has extracted plenty via TikTok; and the established use of TikTok as an avenue of CCP propaganda and censorship.”
The Federalist: “Why The ‘#StopWillow’ Movement On TikTok May Be A CCP Influence Campaign”
“I made a spreadsheet of 64 TikTok accounts with viral videos opposing the Willow Project. As of last Friday [March 24, 2023], each of the accounts, with videos garnering anywhere from 65,000-7.6 million views, had posted exclusively anti-Willow Project content and began first posting on Feb. 28 at the earliest. None of the videos include people’s faces. All of them use AI-generated voices or trending sounds and feature many of the same videos.”
StopTheChinazis.org: “TikTok Is Pretty Much a Chinese Communist Party App, Study Confirms”
“The study can’t be considered in isolation, though; the ‘strong possibility’ that TikTok obeys the CCP propaganda-wise is really a virtual certainty.”
StopTheChinazis.org: “Proof TikTok Protects User Info From ChinaGov”
“So any organization based in China ‘shall’ help with intelligence gathering if the Chinese government asks. And must also ‘keep the secrets of the national intelligence work from becoming known to the public.’ Is there another provision in Article 7 that says ‘unless you are asked about these secrets in a congressional hearing’?”
NCRI: “How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives”
“Given the research above, we assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government.”
The Guardian: “TikTok is part of China’s cognitive warfare campaign”
“While a TikTok ban may take out the first and fattest mole, it fails to contend with the wider shift to cognitive warfare as the sixth domain of military operations under way, which includes China’s influence campaigns on TikTok, a mass collection of personal and biometric data from American citizens and their race to develop weapons that could one day directly assault or disable human minds. We ignore this broader context at our peril….
“Foreign biometric data collection on Americans is increasing, with users unwittingly providing facial recognition data through TikTok’s filters and games. But the current focus on TikTok shouldn’t blind us to the collection of sensitive biometric data by China through other technology it has deployed in the United States. One example is the Flowtime device, a neurotechnology headset used by many Americans for meditation, gaming and other purposes, produced by Hangzhou Enter Electronic Technology Co, Ltd (‘Entertech’), a Chinese-based company.”
The Guardian: “TikTok has been accused of ‘aggressive’ data harvesting. Is your information at risk?”
“The average user might not be at immediate risk, Potter said. ‘But if you’re involved in something more sensitive or discussing topics that are sensitive…you’ve become very interesting to them very quickly.’
“A dissident in the Chinese diaspora community, or a critic of the Chinese government, might be ‘extremely concerned about their personal cyber security’ on TikTok, Paterson said.”
Washington Post: “A former TikTok employee tells Congress the app is lying about Chinese spying”
“The former employee worked as head of a unit within TikTok’s Safety Operations team, which oversaw technical risk management and compliance issues, including which employees had access to company tools and user data, according to documents he shared with The Post.
“He argues that a nationwide ban would be unnecessary to resolve the technical concerns, which he said could be fixed with “doable and feasible” solutions that would go beyond Project Texas’s protocols. He said he worked to address the data-privacy issues internally but was fired after raising his concerns.”
Consumer Reports: “How TikTok Tracks You Across the Web, Even If You Don’t Use the App”
“A Consumer Reports investigation finds that TikTok, one of the country’s most popular apps, is partnering with a growing number of other companies to hoover up data about people as they travel across the internet. That includes people who don’t have TikTok accounts….
“Disconnect found that data being transmitted to TikTok can include your IP address, a unique ID number, what page you’re on, and what you’re clicking, typing, or searching for, depending on how the website has been set up.”
[CR compares TikTok to the data-scooping of American companies like Google and Meta but does not mention the fact that its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China.]
