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A 3D printed Tik Tok logo is seen in front of U.S. flag in this illustration taken on Oct. 6, 2020. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters) Commentary
TikTok is on a rampage, expanding into music, online purchases, search engines, fulfillment centers, and warehouses to rival not only Instagram, Facebook, and Google, but eventually Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. TikTok, and the Chinese regime that controls it, would like to be America’s “everything app,” an idea that Elon Musk is thinking about, too.
Bad ideas come in pairs, and just as TikTok and Musk seek to control your phone and purchases, they also promote the increasing control of Beijing over Taiwan. The regime has a powerful influence over Musk and TikTok because they both have close business ties to China.
On Oct. 7, the Financial Times published an interview with Musk in which he advocates turning Taiwan into a “special administrative zone” of China, like Hong Kong. Taiwan’s government was not pleased and responded that freedom is “not for sale.”
TikTok is owned by Bytedance, headquartered in Beijing. If Musk owned Twitter, that place of moderate free speech could converge with and eventually be eclipsed by TikTok through the same kind of pressure from Beijing that likely led to Musk’s kowtow on Taiwan. A woman walks past the headquarters of ByteDance, the parent company of video sharing app TikTok, in Beijing on Sept. 16, 2020. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images) We can’t trust a China-linked billionaire to own our freedom of speech. Neither can we trust what TikTok’s algorithms feed us daily. The evidence shows that on controversial topics, it serves its users misinformation , geared to Beijing’s interests, at the top of their feeds.
We can expect new TikTok content and sales algorithms to serve sanitized media and products, with no “Free East Turkistan” music or […]
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They’re Trying to Shut Us Down
Over the last several months, I’ve lost count of how many times the powers-that-be have tried to shut us down. They’ve sent hackers at us, forcing us to take extreme measures on web security. They sent attorneys after us, but thankfully we’re not easily intimidated by baseless accusations or threats. They’ve even gone so far as to make physical threats. Those can actually be a bit worrisome but Remington has me covered.
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JD Rucker