Ricktloml, my own analysis is that, like everything else from mainland China, it is a potential menace.
With TikTok, though, there are a few big concerns: One of the more problematic implications is a 2017 Chinese law, which requires Chinese companies to comply with government intelligence operations if asked. That means that companies based in China have little recourse to decline should the government request to access data.
The second is what the Chinese Communist Party might do with that data. Samantha Hoffman, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute told The Verge that “The [Communist] Party of China collects bulk data overseas and then uses it to help with things that relate to state security like propaganda and identifying public sentiment to understand how people feel about a particular issue,” she said. “It’s about controlling the media environment globally. Once you have control, you can use it to influence and shape the conversation.”
TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based internet technology company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming. It is used to create short dance, lip-sync, comedy and talent videos.
ByteDance first launched Douyin for the China market in September 2016.
The short history of TikTok is both culturally plentiful — memes like VSCO girls and “OK boomer” have penetrated the mainstream, and becoming “TikTok famous” is now a common goal for high schoolers — and controversial. The company has faced child data privacy fines by the FTC and has been linked to several deaths in India; it has been accused of banning certain content, both politically sensitive and not.
Now, it faces potentially major threats thanks to its ties to China: one in the form of a national security review by the US government, and another in a lawsuit brought by a college student alleging her data had been transferred to two Chinese servers. Here’s the latest on what’s happening, and why it matters.
US politicians’ concern over TikTok began with an investigation the Guardian published on September 25, which revealed leaked documents that showed TikTok instructing its moderators to censor videos that mentioned topics sensitive to the Communist Party of China: Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, and the religious group Falun Gong, for instance. The Guardian’s investigation came after the Washington Post noted that a search for Hong Kong-related topics on TikTok showed virtually zero content about the ongoing and widely publicized pro-democracy protests, which were a major topic on other social media sites at the time.
In early October, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) called for a formal investigation into whether TikTok poses a national security risk. “These Chinese-owned apps are increasingly being used to censor content and silence open discussion on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Government and Community Party,” Rubio wrote in a letter addressed to US Department of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
“The Chinese government’s nefarious efforts to censor information inside free societies around the world cannot be accepted and pose serious long-term challenges to the US and our allies.”
Later that month, two senators from both political parties, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Cotton (R-AR), followed suit, calling for a “rigorous assessment” of the potential national security risks of TikTok by US intelligence officials. Their memo expressed concern that it could be a target of foreign influence campaigns like those during the 2016 election, and noted that Chinese companies are required to adhere to Chinese law, which grants the government much greater access than the US to the data belonging to private companies.
“Security experts have voiced concerns that China’s vague patchwork of intelligence, national security, and cybersecurity laws compel Chinese companies to support and cooperate with intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” read the letter, addressed to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. “Without an independent judiciary to review requests made by the Chinese government for data or other actions, there is no legal mechanism for Chinese companies to appeal if they disagree with a request.”
The public pressure worked: On November 1, Reuters reported that the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which investigates potential national security implications of foreign acquisitions of US companies, would be launching a review of ByteDance’s near $1 billion acquisition of Musical.ly. Specifics of the investigation are unknown, though one person familiar with the matter told the New York Times that the US government had evidence of TikTok sending US user data to China.
TikTok’s questionable moderation directives faced further scrutiny in November when it suspended a 17-year-old New Jersey student named Feroza Aziz for posting a three-part video about the Chinese oppression of its Uighur Muslim population. TikTok claimed it did not suspend Aziz’s account for its content, and said her videos were removed “due to a human moderation error.”
The same month, a TikTok whistleblower leaked moderation guidelines to the German publication Netzpolitik that showed moderators are instructed to label any political content as either “not recommended” or “not for feed,” meaning they will not show up on TikTok’s main “For You” page, or will be more difficult to discover in its search fields.
As the Washington Post notes, “the changes still give the lie to TikTok’s insistence that ‘political sensitivities’ do not factor into its decisions.”
[quote=Ricktloml][quote=Zemirah]The Trump Rally tickets were free to the public.
This is from:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/tiktok-teens-fake-tickets-trump-tulsa-rally"The discrepancy between expectation and reality could very well be at the hands of the "Many teenagers, K-Pop fans, and other folks (including a 51-year-old teacher from Iowa) who racked up ticket reservations and then never showed up.
As noted by the New York Times, dozens of videos began circulating on TikTok ahead of the rally, urging other users to sign up for rally tickets without any intention of going.
“It would be a shame if people knew reserving seats at a Trump rally were free,” one TikToker wrote in the caption in a video posted earlier this month.
YouTuber Elijah Daniel told the Times that the movement was spread via “Alt TikTok,” adding: “K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly.”[/quote
Isn't TikTok affiliated with the Communist Chinese government[/quote]