Tag: tik tok

TikTok Sues US Government Over Forced Divestment Law

TikTok filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to block a new law requiring either the sale of the app by its Chinese parent company or its removal from app stores and web-hosting services. About two weeks ago, President Joe Biden signed the bill, which had passed both legislative chambers with broad bipartisan support.

In a filing with a federal appeals court in Washington, TikTok challenges the constitutionality of the new law on the grounds that the U.S. government infringed the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its hundreds of millions of users over national security concerns.

The new law sets the initial deadline for a TikTok sale by January 2025, and President Biden can decide to extend the deadline by another three months to allow the deal to be completed.

Lawmakers supporting the new law argued that it was not a ban but a divestiture aimed at preventing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from accessing American consumer data and the algorithm owned by TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, from potentially influencing Americans.

However, the company has maintained that it has not and will not share American user data with the CCP. According to China’s counterespionage law, ByteDance must hand over data on American users if requested.

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Mitt Romney Says Congress Supports Banning TikTok for Israel

In a conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) acknowledged that banning TikTok has such strong support in Congress because the social media platform has hurt Israel’s public relations battle.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” Romney said at the McCain Institute this past Friday. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

The official justification for targeting TikTok is the unfounded allegation that it’s a Chinese spy tool because its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and pro-Palestinian content.

Blinken blamed social media in general when asked by Romney why Israel was losing the global PR war. Palestinian journalists have been able to broadcast to the whole world the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza using social media, including graphic videos of dead or wounded children being dug out of rubble following an Israeli airstrike.

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The TikTok Ban Is The Next Patriot Act

HR 7521, called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, is a recent development in American politics. TikTok has been in the news for the past few years, after the public became aware of its connections to China. The popular social media mobile app is currently owned by ByteDance Ltd, a Chinese company. China and the United States currently have a rocky relationship, leading to fears that the Chinese government could potentially use this app to spy on American citizens. Several states and counties voted to restrict the usage of the app in some ways, mostly disallowing government employees from using it on government-owned phones. Earlier this month, the United States Congress passed a piece of legislation that would restrict the app’s availability if certain requirements are not met by ByteDance.

Putting aside the idea that politicians rarely have pure motives, this act has the potential to be just as dangerous as the Patriot Act. With a supposed goal of protecting American national security, the Patriot Act granted sweeping permissions to the federal government and the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens, with far less due process. In addition to having the potential to violate privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment, this new act is a blatant attack on property rights. Mobile device manufacturers and owners have every right to install whatever software they would like, as it is their property. Any illusion of a right to national security is immediately contradicted as collective rights are positive in nature and thus not rights at all.

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TikTok Ban Exposes Hypocrisy in Congress

President Biden’s campaign will continue using the popular social media site TikTok even though the president supported a provision in the military aid bill he recently signed forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok within 270 days. If ByteDance does not sell TikTok within the required time, TikTok will be banned in the USA. Biden’s continued use of TikTok to reach the approximately 150 million American TikTok users, is not the only example of hypocrisy from politicians who support the TikTok ban.

The TikTok ban was driven by claims that, because ByteDance is a Chinese company, TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government and, thus. is helping the Chinese government collect data on American citizens. However, the only tie ByteDance has to the Chinese government is via a Chinese government controlled company that owns a small amount of stock in a separate ByteDance operation. Furthermore, ByteDance stores its data in an American facility not accessible by the Chinese government.

Just days before passing the TikTok ban, the same Senate that is so concerned about TikTok’s alleged violations of Americans’ privacy passed the FISA reauthorization bill. This bill not only extended existing authorities for warrantless wiretapping and surveillance, it made it easier for government agencies to spy on American citizens. It did this by requiring anyone with access to a targeted individual’s electronic device to cooperate with intelligence agencies.

Supporters of banning TikTok also cited concerns over the site’s “content moderation” policies. These policies reportedly forbid postings embarrassing to the Chinese government such as some related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square confrontation or the Free Tibet movement.

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TikTok Announces Crack Down on “Conspiracy Theories”

As of May 17, TikTok will start implementing new rules affecting content appearing on the app’s For You feed (FYF), and the changes are prompted by concerns about so-called “harmful speech” and “misinformation.”

FYF is vital for the visibility of content, since it opens and plays videos automatically when the app is launched, something TikTok refers to as its “personalized recommendation system.”

A post on the company’s site titled, “For You feed Eligibility Standards,” reveals that content that is deemed as health or news “misinformation” will be censored from this tab more stringently going forward.

On the health side, TikTok looks to clamp down on anything from videos promoting “unproven treatments,” dieting and weight loss, plastic surgery (unless related risks are included as well), videos allegedly misrepresenting scientific findings, to the very broadly defined content that is considered misleading, and “could potentially” cause harm to public health.

Clarity is not the announcement’s strong suit, and so the new rules will tackle even such things as “overgeneralized mental health information.” Also in the FYF “doghouse” will be content that’s found to be too focused on “sadness” (including “sharing sad quotes”).

Then there’s the blog post’s “explanation” that some types of content “may be fine if seen occasionally, but problematic if viewed in clusters.”

What this actually means is control of users’ exposure to content at its finest: “We will interrupt repetitive content patterns to ensure it is not viewed too often,” TikTok said.

When it comes to hate speech, “outlawed” is now even “some content” that is deemed to be making insinuations or indirect statements about protected groups – such that “may implicitly demean” them.

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TikTok Measure Passed by House Is Unconstitutional in Multiple Ways

Is TikTok’s time finally up? On Saturday, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would require a change in the app’s ownership or ban it if that doesn’t happen.

Called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, it’s essentially the same divestiture-or-ban bill I wrote about in this newsletter back in March, now tucked into a larger bill (H.R. 8038, the insanely named 21st Century Peace through Strength Act) that deals with everything from fentanyl trafficking to Russian sanctions, Iranian petroleum, Hamas, and boatloads of foreign aid.

The most talked-about part of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would ban TikTok unless it completely breaks ties with its Chinese parent-company, ByteDance, within 270 days.

But the bill goes far beyond TikTok, and could be used to justify a ban on all sorts of popular apps tied to China, Russia, Iran, or any other country that gets deemed a foreign adversary.

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French woman found dead in Italian church was searching for ghosts in possible Tik Tok stunt, police say

A 22-year-old French woman whose blood-drained body was found in an abandoned church in northern Italy’s Aosta Valley over the weekend had been looking for a haunted house believed to contain ghosts, according to police.

She told family members about her plans before leaving the village near Lyon where she lived, a police spokeswoman in the town of La Salle told CNN.

Police believe the victim could have been attempting to carry out a TikTok stunt, adding that her death could be related to a ghost hunting competition being played in France on the social media platform. The other working theories are that it was a “consented murder” or sacrifice, or an attempt to carry out a social media prank in the deconsecrated church. Police are still searching for a young man who was seen with her. There are also two other missing persons cases in the area which police say could be related.

According to the spokeswoman, the victim and a male friend had been seen in the area dressed “like vampires.” A witness interviewed by police say the young woman was pale and “emaciated” and the man had dark hair and olive skin. The witness told police investigators that she looked like a “walking corpse.”

The dead woman, whose name has not been released, had been stabbed with what investigators say was a camping knife and had bled to death, according to medical examiner Roberto Testi. She also had two gunshots to her neck and one to her abdomen that police say may have been inflicted after she died. Some of the blood had been scraped off the floor and removed from the crime scene, police told CNN. There were no signs of struggle, police say.

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The frenzy to ban TikTok is another National Security State scam

On November 20, 2023, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote in a joint letter to the CEO of TikTok that the platform was guilty of “stoking anti-Semitism, support, and sympathy for Hamas” after the October 7 attack on Israel. “This deluge of pro-Hamas content is driving hateful anti-Semitic rhetoric and violent protests on campuses across the country,” McMorris Rodgers charged. A year ago, in March 2023, she had already declared: “TikTok should be banned in the United States of America.”

This week the plan came to fruition, with McMorris Rodgers and her colleagues orchestrating what could be best described as a legislative sneak attack: suddenly the House of Representatives, a notoriously dysfunctional body — particularly this Congressional term, with all the Republican leadership turmoil — took decisive, concerted, expedited action to pass legislation banning TikTok before most of the public would have even gotten a chance to notice. The bill was introduced March 5, 2024, advanced by a unanimous committee vote on March 7, 2024, then approved for final passage March 13, 2024. Almost nothing ever passes Congress at such warp-speed.

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TIKTOK THREAT IS PURELY HYPOTHETICAL, U.S. INTELLIGENCE ADMITS

THE PURPORTED THREAT of TikTok to U.S. national security has inflated into a hysteria of Chinese spy balloon proportions, but the official record tells a different story: U.S. intelligence has produced no evidence that the popular social media site has ever coordinated with Beijing. That fact hasn’t stopped many in Congress and even President Joe Biden from touting legislation that would force the sale of the app, as the TikTok frenzy fills the news pages with empty conjecture and innuendo.

In interviews and testimony to Congress about TikTok, leaders of the FBI, CIA, and the director of national intelligence have in fact been careful to qualify the national security threat posed by TikTok as purely hypothetical. With access to much of the government’s most sensitive intelligence, they are well placed to know.

The basic charge is that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese company, could be compelled by the government in Beijing to use their app in targeted operations to manipulate public opinion, collect mass data on Americans, and even spy on individual users. (TikTok says it has never shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked. This week, TikTok CEO Shou Chew said that “there’s no CCP ownership” of ByteDance, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.)

Though top national security officials seem happy to echo these allegations of Chinese control of TikTok, they stop short of saying that China has ever actually coordinated with the company.

Typical is an interview CIA Director William Burns gave to CNN in 2022, where he said it was “troubling to see what the Chinese government could do to manipulate TikTok.” Not what the Chinese government has done, but what it could do.

What China could do turns out to be a recurring theme in the statements of the top national security officials.

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Banning TikTok is a Power Grab for the Deep State 

Legislators have made exceedingly clear that the intent of the bill they’re currently fast-tracking through Congress is “to finally ban TikTok in the United States,” as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chair of the House Republican conference, proudly put it.

“TikTok must be banned,” concurred Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), the Republican chief deputy whip.

“I applaud the strong bipartisan effort to ban TikTok,” added Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“No one is trying to disguise anything,” clarified Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). “We want to ban TikTok.”

Some of the bill’s proponents, like Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), have been less forthcoming than their colleagues. Sherrill strangely repeats the common yet obviously specious claim that the bill “doesn’t ban TikTok,” which is just pure politician sleight-of-hand: No, the text does not specifically provide for an immediate, automatic, blanket ban of TikTok, but it does provide for a fatal ultimatum to effectuate the ban of TikTok within six months, requiring TikTok to comply with U.S. demands for divestiture from its parent company, ByteDance, or face federal prohibition. So while the legislation would not impose the ban right away, it does create the exact statutory mechanism by which TikTok is named and targeted for banning in the very near future.

Ultimately, the desired end-result is the same one that has been long sought by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the bill’s leading sponsor: “To ban TikTok … before it’s too late.” The forced divestiture is merely a mechanism to achieve this predetermined outcome.

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