Australian senator worried that TikTok is a sneaky data collection service
Posted by Robert Leonard / July 7, 2020
Liberal senator Jim Molan, the deputy chair of the Foreign Interference through Social Media inquiry, has told the Guardian that TikTok may be “a data collection service disguised as social media.” Nationals MP George Christensen has also said that TikTok “should be banned in Australia as should other online communication networks used and abused by Communist China’s intelligence/military apparatus including WeChat.”
TikTok, the massive China-based social media platform, is expecting to lose some $6 billion after India banned the app. If you’ve been on any form of social media in the last six months or so, you’ve seen a TikTok video––they’re obvious because of the huge, annoying TikTok watermark. And as common as TikTok videos are on, say, Instagram, the TikTok platform itself is a million times more productive. But what the millions of users don’t realize about the platform is that it is probably a spying apparatus for the Chinese government on a scale hitherto unknown. We now know about it because of the loosely organized collective of hackers called Anonymous. India seemed to get it, goaded along by their own beef with China, and banned the app.
China has been busy lately. YouTube has been automatically deleting comments that are critical of communist China for months. The company confirmed as much and said they were working to fix the issue. This is mere the latest bad PR for China.
Angela Merkel is facing mounting pressure from German lawmakers to confront the Chinese president Xi Jinping over China’s human rights violations. Almost on cue, a Chinese scholar has been arrested for criticizing the government.
A University of Queensland philosophy student is facing expulsion for criticizing China’s human rights record. Let’s let the sink in for a moment. This student might be expelled for criticizing the same government that is sending Uighurs to detention camps for growing beards or wearing veils, both related to Muslim practices. The same government that is also detaining Uighurs for visiting foreign websites.
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