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

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The judge gave the illusion of actually stopping the ban. It's for show. Do you really think that Trump was like, hey I'm going to ban this TikTok app due to national security reasons and then a judge in California was like no you can't do that and he just sat on his hands about it? There's way more going on behind the scenes here than is apparent. Trump could within the hour, literally within the hour, ban TikTok an…

Yes the decision is being appealed.

Right, it’s for show. There is no disadvantage to letting this run its course through the court system, and then when you don’t like the outcome you just say well “national security” and ban it.

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

#112
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the truth, I don’t know why you are downvoted. Point is at the moment it’s infeasible to use the CCP membership to infer if a person or organization works for CCP. It’s a deadly dangerous door to open because the next step is to inspect the direct family affiliation to CCP. Given the proliferation of CCP members, it’ll be affecting over half billion people and effectively you are telling most Chineses in Ameri…

In the US people either under estimate the size of the CCP or act as though it is an egalitarian group of people where everyone has access to all information and is briefed on strategy. The CCP doesn't vote on its strategy among all of its members. Most things that we see as controversial or dangerous when it comes to the CCP aren't even apparent to most CCP members. Joining the CCP isn't generally a decision to turn…

This concerns me very much. Information control can basically be equated with population control. I have no doubt that your average Chinese citizen is a good person and it pisses me off that much more knowing the CCP is manipulating thier own people, often at the expense of thier own people. I recently saw a video that you might appreciate on the rise of open source softwate in China as a means of circumventing censorship and oppression.10 minute video, worth the watch.

Heres the link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RFjIBM0TR7U

Or you can go to YouTube and search china rise of open source it's by a channel called honeypot. To be honest i fear that the US is also starting to head down that path. Very alarming.

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

#113

The whole ban is so gross. It's clearly politically targeted to deplatform Trump critics all while firing people up about China. For those that aren't familiar. TikTok is pretty ubiquitous in the under 21 crowd while being practically unused by older people. It's sort of like when young people fled to Twitter and Instagram to get away from their parents on Facebook. It's basically the next Twitter for that age group.…

While i dont think the threat from the CCP is something that can be reasonably boiled down to nothing more than made up Trump antics as you seem to imply, you do raise a relatively good point about targeting specific companies as opposed to an all out ban on Chinese tech companies in the US.

Its not that there isnt something to it but i would agree that his handling of the situation is poor and ineffective. For instance, rather than risking thier intel on TikTok specifically, they could try spreading awareness about the Belt and Road Initiative for instance which went from 60 something pledged countries in 2018 to ~138 pledged cpuntries in 2019. Simple, immediate, effective. No need for divisive identity politics.

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but many of the reasons why China doesn't want US social media companies in China are also the same reasons why the US shouldn't want those same companies in America, namely that they're unregulated loose cannons who are fine with causing social division and strife if it only increases their bottom line. Why would Tiktok need to maliciously harm the US when just their simple act of seeking profit is already doi…

Well then why should the US have yet another social media app coming into the country and causing harm?

Because the badness is roughly per unit of attention so if Tiktok is taking people's time away from Twitter/Facebook/IG etc. it's not clear that the sum total of badness is increasing.

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

#115
post #71
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't like 10% of chinese population party members? How many employees has Bytedance in total?

According to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party ) the CPC has 91,914,000 members in 2020. Which is around 6.5% of the population of the PRC or around 1.2% of the world population (assuming around 7.8 bil people). Byte Dance has around 30k employees in total (world wide) according to https://craft.co/bytedance so by random sampling we would expect 350 employees to be CPC members. So if t…

bytedance has 70k employees right now
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