Well, it’s official. The US president, Joe Biden, is a fumbling and uninformed or deliberate and cynical China-enabler.
Among the other things and countries they’re being congressionally investigated for, such as Ukraine, Biden and son Hunter are being investigated for getting paid millions by CCP-linked companies and executives in China during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president. The evidence indicates that Hunter was being rewarded for possessing the very important skill of having as his father the then-vice president of the United States, Joe Biden; and it indicates that Joe Biden, then of semi-sound mind, abetted and benefited from his son’s wheeling and dealing.
Ticking and tocking
What did China expect in return?
Is the decision of the Biden campaign to make use of CCP propaganda outlet TikTok part of the deal? Or is Biden, at least nominal head of his own campaign, one must assume, just stumbling into the TikTok fiasco as he stumbles into so many fiascos? Is Biden not getting the intelligence briefings that he is supposed to be getting? Is Biden getting them and then forgetting them a minute later? What exactly is going on?
As far as China, always on top of things itself, is concerned, Biden is doing an ace job on at least this one thing.
“Biden campaign joining TikTok proves ‘US national security threat’ rhetoric nonsense,” yuglurbifates the headline of another CCP propaganda outlet, Global Times.
The periodical explains that “US President Joe Biden’s campaign officially joined TikTok this month, sparking waves of heated discussions to this day. As a social media app that has been heavily portrayed by the US as a ‘national security threat,’ TikTok being used by Biden’s campaign highlights the unjust suppression of TikTok by American politicians and proves the hype nonsense.”
Moreover: “It is obvious that American politicians deliberately label TikTok as a ‘national security threat,’ and the facts prove that their smearing and distortion of China are clear. This once again demonstrates that the US government has no bottom line on issues related to China and is engaging in inappropriate witch hunts against everything related to the country.”
A Global Times article is not really going full tilt unless it hauls in an “expert” at some point to verify its findings. In this case, we have Lü Xiang, “a US studies expert and research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.” According to Lü Xiang, the contradiction between American politicians’ own use of TikTok and their claim that TikTok is a national security threat “has failed to make the US propaganda of the ‘China threat’ theory successful but has proven TikTok’s innocence.” Clearly, an expert.
Not so fast
The one thing the article doesn’t discuss is why anyone would think that TikTok functions as the propaganda outlet of the Chinese Communist Party and threatens the security of Americans.
Several years ago, The Guardian reported on TikTok’s censorship and propaganda.
TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, according to leaked documents detailing the site’s moderation guidelines.
The documents, revealed by the Guardian for the first time, lay out how ByteDance, the Beijing-headquartered technology company that owns TikTok, is advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.
The revelations come amid rising suspicion that discussion of the Hong Kong protests on TikTok is being censored for political reasons: a Washington Post report earlier this month noted that a search on the site for the city-state revealed “barely a hint of unrest in sight”….
Another ban covers “demonisation or distortion of local or other countries’ history such as May 1998 riots of Indonesia, Cambodian genocide, Tiananmen Square incidents”.
In the recent Heritage Foundation report “TikTok Generation: A CCP Official in Every Pocket,” Kara Frederick writes:
Concerns over data security do not scratch the surface of TikTok’s ability to manipulate the information environment. ByteDance and TikTok have already pushed pro-CCP narratives to the U.S. public, censored content of which the party-state disapproves, and gathered the necessary information to conduct tailored influence campaigns….
In one example of these soft influence operations against U.S. users, former ByteDance employees alleged in 2022 that TikTok’s parent company deliberately served pro-China content to a U.S. audience through its old news app, TopBuzz, in addition to censoring stories unfavorable to the Chinese government….
Americans should be concerned about the integration of TikTok data with China’s growing trove of stolen datasets from hacks conducted at least as far back as 2014. Seemingly disparate datasets, once integrated, can help foreign adversaries to create profiles of American citizens that are ripe for blackmail, espionage, and more.
There’s more where those passages came from. So there’s evidence that TikTok propagandizes and censors on behalf of the CCP and there’s evidence that TikTok sucks up user data on behalf of the CCP.
Your response, Global Times? “Well, Biden is using TikTok, so…”
