The US House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill giving Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to sell that part of its business
China could use social media app TikTok to influence the 2024 US elections, the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has told a House of Representatives intelligence committee hearing.
Asked by Democratic Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi if China’s ruling Communist party (CCP) would use TikTok to influence the elections, Haines said “we cannot rule out that the CCP would use it”.
Lawmakers have long voiced concerns that the Chinese government could access user data or influence what people see on the app, including pushing content to stoke US political divisions.
Right? The algorithms are all designed to stoke outrage. Why don’t we do something like the EU and pass legislation that applies to all social media companies, not just demonize certain ones. What am I missing here?
I can only think that TikTok’s status as a state-affiliated company might have something to do with it being singled out.
In practice, however, other social media platforms are controlled by capital and state actors have a lot of capital to leverage, so there’s effectively no difference other than China can do for free via TikTok what Russia and the US have to pay for on any other social media platform.
Mountains of hypocrisy and xenophobia.
They want to be able to tell voters on the right that they “stood up to China and big tech” and voters on the left that they “stood up to social media companies perverting democracy” without going after the American companies that do the same things but pay them a lot more in legal bribes (and probably illegal ones too).