US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

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> Why should they reveal confidential intelligence?

Because it is in their economic interest for people to believe that and they are in a large trade dispute with the origin country.

So without any proof this is essentially trade war propaganda.

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):

1. Bytedance employs 130 Party members.

2. The party members had a rally with Communist salutes and pledges and such.

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.

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.

Let's assume TikTok is the mouth piece of Chinese propaganda. Why aren't we doing anything about another mouthpiece that we already got confirmation that it is being used by both our and foreign intelligence.

Is that one accepted because it benefits the president? What kind of leader of free nation would accept something like that?

My understanding is that all Chinese companies, especially very successful ones, absolutely are beholden to the desires or supposed needs of the Party. Especially when it comes to anything they consider to be relevant to national security or military interests. Which is pretty much everything unfortunately.

This is not a special case. It's the core structure of their system.

Personally I think it's very obvious that this is a national security issue for the United States. And I think if the political climate were different, it would not be disputed in any way.

I think the underlying issue is not ByteDance or Trump. The core issue is the extreme cultural/idealogical and political divergence between the two large countries.

Until there is a serious plan for resolving that, I don't think we can just pretend those problems don't exist.

Young people really have no idea that the paradigm the world operates on is actually quite brutal. We definitely should change that. But until we do.. well honestly the way kids seem to be begging for censorship, and love garbage like TikTok, and are insisting on entitlements that will bankrupt the country with no serious plan for increasing revenue.. I feel like it's almost over already. So it doesn't matter what I say.

I should just start studying Mandarin already.