Tag Archive for: TikTok

Ex-TikTok Employee Alleges American Executives Were ‘Completely Complicit’ In Giving ‘U.S. Data To China’

U.S.-based TikTok executives were totally “complicit” in efforts to hand over Americans’ data to China despite company assertions to the contrary, a former senior data scientist at the social media platform alleged, according to Fortune.

The House of Representatives passed legislation in March that would compel Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok for the social media app to continue operating in the United States because of the potential national security threats of its ownership. Evan Turner, a former senior data scientist who worked for the popular app in 2022 from April to September, alleged TikTok hid the participation of ByteDance in the app’s operations during his tenure, which overlapped with an initiative intended to solve the issue of Chinese data access, Fortune reported Monday.

“I literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China,” Turner told Fortune. “They were completely complicit in that. There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this.”

Turner first reported to a Beijing-based ByteDance executive but the company then announced Project Texas, a $1.5 billion initiative to establish an isolated unit to safeguard American data, leading him to receive a documented reassignment to a Seattle manager, he told Fortune. However, a human resources representative acknowledged Turner would persist in collaborating with the ByteDance executive.

The former senior data scientist participated in short meetings with the ByteDance executive on a weekly basis, where he would provide rudimentary updates on his progress with key assignments, Fortune reported.

Turner was allegedly required to send spreadsheets containing hundreds of thousands of American TikTok users’ data, including names, emails and locations to ByteDance staff every 14 days, he told Fortune. The project’s intention was to use the data to learn trends to make users more hooked on the app, and it occurred after Project Texas launched.

Fortune interviewed 11 ex-employees, many alleging TikTok’s operations were connected to ByteDance to an extent while they worked there despite the company’s claims it was prohibiting the Chinese parent company from having access. Some of the former employees spoke anonymously because of concerns of revenge against them, according to the outlet.

Managers within TikTok were directing employees to send similar data to ByteDance, bypassing authorized channels, according to current and previous employees as well as company records The Wall Street Journal saw in January. Executives believe it is crucial to distribute the data supposedly protected by Project Texas to ByteDance because it controls TikTok’s algorithm, individuals with knowledge of the project’s unit told the WSJ.

TikTok and ByteDance did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s response for comment.

AUTHOR

JASON COHEN

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The Pentagon Is Paying A Chinese Communist Party-Linked Venture Capital Firm For Tutoring Services

The CEO of a Chinese venture capital firm that quietly bought up a U.S. education company holding a Pentagon contract has long-standing connections to multiple Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence units, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

Primavera Capital, a Hong Kong-based venture capital firm, was an early investor in TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and owns Princeton Review and Tutor.com. However, a review of the firm’s Chinese-language website found that CEO and founder Fred Hu has extensive ties to the Chinese government and belonged to organizations that the U.S. government has identified as part of the CCP’s “United Front” system.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) says the CCP uses its United Front system to influence foreign actors and collect intelligence. China’s United Front is overseen by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), which USCC has characterized as a “Chinese intelligence service.”

The USCC was established by Congress to monitor and investigate the national security implications of the economic relationship between the U.S. and China.

Primavera, through its ownership of Tutor.com, now holds a contract with the Pentagon, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in February 2024. The tutoring service is a “long-standing provider” to U.S. military servicemembers and their families, and is funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR) General Library Program.

In 2008, Hu became a delegate of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in Hunan province, according to his company’s website, which the DCNF translated from Chinese. Hunan’s CPPCC membership roster identifies Hu as a delegate in 20132021 and during the most recently listed 2022 congress.

“CPPCC delegates attend a high-profile annual meeting to receive direction from the CCP regarding the ways its policies should be characterized to both domestic and foreign audiences,” according to the USCC. “Delegates to the CPPCC serve as proxies for CCP interests by virtue of their participation in this forum, and they frequently act as interlocutors with foreign government officials, businesses and academic institutions.”

The CPPCC’s charter states that delegates must “uphold the leadership” of the CCP, “facilitate implementation of state foreign policy,” “take advantage of the CPPCC as a united front organization” and even “keep state secrets.”

Hu appears in photos on the Hunan CPPCC’s website and on Chinese state-run media social media accounts wearing the CPPCC’s distinctive red, clip-on delegate’s badge at the organization’s meetings and during interviews.

Despite this, a Primavera spokesperson denied that Hu any ties to the Chinese government.

“Dr. Fred Hu is not a member of the CCP or any other political party, and Primavera Capital has no ties to any political party in China or any other country,” Primavera’s spokesperson told the DCNF by email. “Dr. Hu is not an advisor to the Chinese government, and belongs to none of the United Front organizations.”

Yet, Hu is also listed on the Western Returned Scholars Association’s (WRSA) website as a “director” of the organization’s “Entrepreneur Alliance.”

“WRSA is subordinate to the United Front Work Department, the CCP agency tasked with coordinating influence operations at the operational level” and seeks to “meet the requirements of the [CCP] leadership that it should ‘become a bridge between the Party and overseas students and scholars,’” a 2020 USCC staff research report states.

Toward that end, WRSA conducts “influence operations by disseminating propaganda,” the 2020 report states.

U.S. lawmakers have raised concerns over Primavera’s ownership of Tutor.com, an online tutoring platform.

Tutor.com partners with universities, K–12 schools, libraries and the U.S. military to “provide 24/7, on-demand tutoring and homework help,” according to its website.

Most recently, Cotton sent a letter to the Department of Defense (DOD) concerning a contract that the Pentagon has with Tutor.com. Cotton’s letter characterized the relationship as “ill-advised, reckless and a danger to U.S. national security,” citing a May 2023 Wall Street Journal investigation.

“While providing educational services, Tutor.com collects personal data on users, such as location, internet protocol addresses and contents of the tutoring sessions,” Cotton wrote. “As Chinese national security laws require companies to release confidential business and customer data to the Chinese government, we are paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Parents Defending Education, a “grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools,” recently identified dozens of U.S. K-12 schools using Tutor.com.

In 2018, Primavera was also one of several venture capital firms to invest a total of $3 billion into ByteDance, which owns TikTok.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Application Act, which, if passed, would force ByteDance to sell its interest in TikTok.

The vote came just days after FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that ByteDance is “beholden to the CCP” during questioning from Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.

“The different kinds of influence operations you’re describing, are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national security concerns represented by TikTok so significant,” Wray told Rubio.

Primavera’s portfolio shows that the firm has also invested in companies tied to alleged human rights violations, including Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime.

In 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security blacklisted SenseTime for allegedly developing racial profiling facial recognition technologies to track ethnic minorities in China’s western province of Xinjiang, which the Chinese government has used in relation to China’s ongoing genocide.

“It’s concerning that a platform providing services to the U.S. military has close connections to a ‘trusted advisor’ to the Chinese government,” a majority spokesperson from the House Select Committee on the CCP told the DCNF. “This issue warrants further scrutiny.”

DOD did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

AUTHOR

PHILIP LENCZYCKI

Daily Caller News Foundation investigative reporter, political journalist, and China watcher. Twitter: @LenczyckiPhilip

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

House Passes Bill That Forces Chinese Parent Company To Sell TikTok

The House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday that would force Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok in order for the social media app to be allowed to operate in the U.S.

The Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act advanced from the House Energy and Commerce Committee by a unanimous vote on March 7. The legislation, which would allow the Beijing-based company roughly five months to sell TikTok, passed with a bipartisan 352 to 65 floor vote, sending the bill to the Senate.

President Joe Biden has signaled he would sign the legislation if it clears the upper chamber.

Critics of the social media app warn of the potential national security threats of its association with the Chinese Communist Party and what they view to be harmful effects on American youth. Others argue that banning the social media app is a violation of First Amendment rights and free enterprise.

TikTok has been critical of the legislation, which it called “an outright ban” in an X statement on March 5. The social media app encouraged its children and teenaged users to call congressional offices and complain about the bill.

“This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs,” TikTok wrote.

Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, appeared to voice opposition to the legislation despite previously attempting to ban the app. Trump’s 2020 ban faced legal challenges, and was eventually repealed by the Biden administration in 2021.

“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”

Wealthy businessman Kevin O’Leary has expressed interest in purchasing the app if the legislation goes into effect.“It’s not going to get banned because I’m going to buy it,” the Shark Tank co-star told Fox News on Friday. “Somebody’s going to buy it. It won’t be Meta and it won’t be Google because a regulator will stop that. A syndicate will be formed. I would like to be involved, obviously.”

AUTHOR

MARY LOU MASTERS

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Here’s How Turkish Smugglers Use Social Media To Help ‘Citizens Of Every Country’ Reach The U.S. Border

Turkish smugglers appear to be using social media platforms to help migrants from across the globe enter the U.S. illegally through the southern border, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of Telegram and TikTok posts.

The advertisements offer arrangements for travel, visas and transportation directly to the U.S.-Mexico border for migrants in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Border Patrol encounters of migrants crossing the southern border illegally have hit numerous records in recent years, with more than 2.2 million encounters in fiscal year 2022 and more than 2 million in fiscal year 2023, according to federal data.

One smuggling advertisement shared on Telegram boasts a “GUARANTEED PASS” for $10,000, which includes a flight from Istanbul to Cancun, a Mexican visa, “CANCUN ENTRANCE,” a hotel room, a taxi, and “DELIVERY TO TIJUANA BORDER.”

“WE HAVE A ROAD FOR CITIZENS OF EVERY COUNTRY WHO CANNOT GET A MEXICO VISA AND FLY TO NICARAGUA,” the post reads.

The two Telegram channels, which have thousands of members, include videos and messages where migrants are thanking specific people. They also feature photos of passports stamped by Mexican authorities.

“This is the border. Thanks to you, we have arrived in the U.S.,” one man said in a TikTok post taken next to the border wall. The video shows migrants thanking “Volkan,” which is a Turkish name.

In a separate video, another man mentions “Volkan,” calling him “king man.”

Another video shows a man appearing to walk across the border, saying that “Volkan” can always get them into the U.S.

“When it looks like no one can let you through the doors … you always leave the door open for everybody,” he said.

Both the names “Volkan” and “Burak,” another Turkish name, appear in Telegram messages. In a private Telegram conversation between the DCNF and “Burak,” the alleged smuggler said he helps people from across the globe enter the U.S. by either obtaining Mexican visas or facilitating travel through Nicaragua or El Salvador.

“Burak” also said the DCNF’s questions sounded like those of a “police officer.” Burak communicated in Turkish, which the DCNF had translated.

The number of migrants arriving from “Special Interest” countries, which are labeled as such due to potential national security risks, increased by nearly 600% to 25,627 in fiscal year 2022 compared to the previous year, according to internal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data previously obtained by the DCNF.

Migrants who are placed in this category can be seen as “possibly have a nexus to terrorism,” according to 2019 DHS fact sheet.

“The smugglers make so much more money off of the Special Interest Aliens,” a Border Patrol official, who requested anonymity, told the DCNF of the fees based on country of origin.

Border Patrol has recorded a sharp uptick in encounters of migrants from Turkey crossing the southern border illegally, according to federal data. Encounters of illegal migrants from Turkey jumped from roughly 1,300 in fiscal year 2021 to more than 15,400 in fiscal year 2023.

But when it comes to using encrypted apps like Telegram, federal investigators have a difficult time cracking down on the efforts, two U.S. intelligence officials told the DCNF on the condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak publicly.

“Telegram will not assist U.S. law enforcement unless the case is regarding terrorism,” the intel officials said. “Smugglers are able to openly recruit to get new clientele.”

“Most immigrants are paying $10,000 to get smuggled to countries that border the United States knowing that once they arrive in the United States they can claim asylum and be released without consequence,” the official added.

TikTok didn’t respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

“Since its creation, Telegram has actively moderated harmful content on our platform,” Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn said in a statement to the DCNF. “Moderators use a combination of proactive monitor of public parts of the platform and user reports in order to remove content that breaches our terms of service.”

In March, CBP sent a memo to agency officials detailing a smuggling route in which a group of Chinese migrants traveled to Istanbul, where they obtained Mexican visas, flew to Mexico City pretending to be couples and then split off to get to the border.

Groups are posing as travel agencies in the capital of Senegal to get migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border by obtaining a visa to travel through the European Union, a CBP spokesperson recently told the DCNF.

“They sell complete packages to connect them to a smuggling organization that will then facilitate their movement up to the border,” the spokesperson added.

The Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Mutants Among Us

How do you create a generation that will believe in anything?

After Oct 7, some purple-haired genderqueer activists on TikTok have taken to reading the Koran and are pondering converting to Islam. That may seem like a leap, but once you’re a teenage girl who decides to be a boy for internet clout, changing to Islam is less difficult.

Hijabs, like dyed hair and androgynous clothes, have long become just another accessory of restless social change. Commercials that claim to relate to the youth invariably include a woman in a hijab as a progressive marker alongside a purple haired they/them, an ascetic activist type in a t-shirt and random minorities laughing together while having lattes on a college campus.

Every generation in the last 60 years has grown up with less of a sense of who it is than the previous one. The intangible sense of being an American that once came from boundless frontiers, a work ethic, a sense of fair play and meritocracy was replaced by cultural programming distributed by daily newspapers, big publishing houses and movie theaters, then television networks and colleges, and finally a massive chaotic stream of social media sewage.

American identity used to be so strong because it was internal and acquired through hard work and the character shaping experiences of life in a country with many possibilities, but it became performative for those members of newer generations with diminishing frontiers who acquired theirs from following a script written for them by the entertainment industry and radical academics. Rather than learning who they were, they copied who they thought they should be.

Social media combined with academic theories that reduced all identities to a construct unleashed a generation of mutants who mimeographed behaviors on social media. Identity became a game. And identity could be gamed for maximum advantage. Socially astute and emotionally unstable teens spread social media diseases like transgenderism or facial tics

Politics became just another cultural identity that could be cosplayed at will. Some social media influencers played far-leftists and then fascists, putting on and taking off costumes, swapping t-shirts with different slogans, Antifa shirts giving way to farm dresses and then hijabs.

On Sunday, they’re wearing pink hats, on Monday, they’re attending alt-right art shows, on Tuesday, they have their fists in the air for BLM, and on Wednesday they’re waving ‘Palestinian’ flags. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” segueways to “From the River to the Sea.” They rarely understand any of the causes they embrace, but politics to them is just a fashion show.

It’s hard to blame the mutants. They grew up on social media where the old high school cliques are about international politics, massive lifestyle changes or castrations and mastectomies. The outfits and the posturing are about getting attention, finding a group, and a lucrative side hustle.

Social media and academia turned millions of people into living viruses whose emotional needs drive them to find weaknesses in our existing systems and ways of living. Teenage girls who might have gone goth and flirted, but not too seriously, with suicide in a previous generation announce that they’re boys and encourage impressionable younger girls to join them.

People die and have their lives ruined, but teenage fads always did that. They rarely disrupted society on this scale, and the teenagers usually moved on and grew up. But that was when there was something to grow up to and a sane world waiting out there for them. In the age of corporate affinity groups and workplace DEI, the intellectual chaos of teenage and college years extends into their adult jobs. And social media continues to incentivize the same behaviors.

The adult world with its fixed truths and serious responsibilities is less present than ever. Rather than imposing the reality that so many had expected, dismissing campus antics with, “just wait till they grow up and get jobs”, that world is a reflection of the same cultural chaos and instability. What is truth, morality, love, family, right and wrong, or even a woman, are up for grabs. And social media has become the battlefield for the endless debates about every element of reality.

The essence of ‘mutantness’ is that change has become its own identity. Radicalism exists for the sake of radicalism. The culture war was always about making leftist politics into the source of identity, but much as in Weimar Germany, this didn’t lead to dominance, just instability. What does perpetual rebellion turn into when there is nothing to rebel against? A broken society eventually slides into communism or fascism just so someone will finally end the chaos.

The ideal recruits for totalitarians are believers who can latch onto any mass movement at the drop of a dime because they desperately need something to believe in to fill the hole within. The leftist culture war has left behind generations of cultural orphans, robbed of faith, family and country, who veer between causes and identities, changing politics, religions and genders with total ease because they want to believe, yet they were born without anything to believe in.

Academic theories have taught them to see everything from the outside, not the inside. Gender, race and sexuality are mere constructs. So they become genderfluid and invent minority roots. Politics is all-consuming, but also meaningless, so they scream for the ‘current thing’. They’ve been robbed of the ability to feel so they go to extremes to try and briefly feel something.

They act out political and gender roles from the outside: they imitate because they have been made incapable of experiencing. With no identity of their own, they’re all ‘Obamas’, trained to see the culture from the outside, fitting in by sending cultural signals, gaining social clout by manipulating people on social media, and yet remaining cold and unfeeling inside.

You might say that a generation raised on social media is a generation of Obamas.

Leftist culture warfare and extremism has created a culture that no one can fit into except by mimicry and running along to keep pace with its latest shifts. The pop culture of last year is this year’s hate crime. Yesterday’s virtue is today’s vice. The best way to adapt is to just shout along. And that is how you end up with mobs chanting in support of Hamas. You could just as easily get them to rally in support of burning witches or killing all the children because most of the participants don’t understand the cause and have learned to internalize a barrage of memes and first-person emoting without feeling the reality of the cause or grasping the consequences.

Nothing is real to them except their own internal unreality and the emotional pain they feel.

Mutants are too busy running away to want to think about what they’re running to. Today’s cause will get tiring soon. It will require too much commitment and then grow stale. They will have to look at themselves in the mirror and see that they are the same people they were yesterday. And then they will find a new cause to champion and a new disguise to wear.

Today they’re transgender, tomorrow they’re Muslims. And the day after tomorrow? Maybe they’ll be Nazis. There are so many possibilities, so many shades of eyeshadow they can put on while listening to lo-fi beats derived from 1920s music: a new reinvention is just waiting for them.

This one, the next current thing, will surely work and make them feel like they matter.

The first casualty of a culture war is the culture. People who derive their identity from the culture, become mutants, changing all the time, zombies, shambling soullessly along, or grab a piece of the culture to recruit their own mutant and zombie armies to gain power.

Or they unplug from a culture gone mad and reach for the truths of their own character.

Know thyself, an old dead white man once said. That is still the only bulwark against mass cultural programming and a society gone mad. We are entering a world of knowers and mutants, those who know what they believe and those who will believe anything. Those who do and those will do anything so they never have to look themselves in the eye.

The business of a healthy society is expecting each man and woman to know themselves. Those who believe in nothing, can become anything, but those who know themselves, can become who they are and fulfill their potential. Mutants can’t change the world,  only destroy it. To change the world, a man or woman has to first deal with their greatest enemy: themselves.

The mutants are willing to do anything to avoid being themselves. They will disfigure themselves, tear down our society, or kill millions so they never have to know themselves.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Leftist queer gremlin’ and other young women convert to Islam as the ‘ultimate rebellion against the West’

What did anyone expect would be the outcome of teaching young people to hate their own culture and heritage?

Anyway, a lot of these women are soon going to be experiencing terrible cases of buyer’s remorse.

Millennials and Gen-Z women are sharing their conversion to Islam in wake of Israel-Hamas war, with ‘leftist queer gremlin’ from Boston among those TikToking her journey

by Bethan Sexton, DailyMail.com, November 19, 2023:

Millennial and Gen-Z women say they’ve been inspired to convert to Islam by the Israel-Hamas war – and are sharing their religious awakenings on TikTok.

Recent converts say the conflict, which began with the murder of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, become a driving factor for their decision to join the Muslim faith.

Experts suggested for many, the choice is the ‘ultimate rebellion against the West’.

Among those sharing their journey is a self-described ‘leftist queer gremlin’ named Alex, who recently purchased a copy of the Quran – even though most interpretations of Islam take a dim view of LGBT relationships.

Alex, who has begun covering her hair with a hijab in line with Islamic teachings on modesty, says she began attending pro-Palestine marches after the October 7 terror attacks and the retaliatory strikes on Gaza….

Read more.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Either Get Rid of TikTok or Just Surrender to China

“TikTok is undoing all of that. It’s crazy to watch in real time.”

In its latest social experiment, Communist China decided to test an algorithm to see if it could get social media influencers and idiot kids under its control on TikTok to come out for Osama bin Laden.

Worked pretty well.

Now that the test is over, TikTok announced that the Osama trend has been shut down. But it was successful.

TikTok’s hot new social-media influencer is . . . Osama bin Laden. Yes, the terrorist who plotted 9/11 went viral this week, and not in a good way. Users have been posting videos to the Chinese-owned app, urging their followers to read bin Laden’s 2002 “letter to America,” while suggesting he was on to something. “I will never look at this country the same,” one user said.

Giving Hollywood and public school teachers control of our kids was a bad idea. Giving Chinese Communist algorithms control over our kids is a much worse idea.

A TikTok influencer went viral this week for promoting Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”

Online personality and pro-Palestinian activist Lynette Adkins urged her over 175,000 TikTok followers on Tuesday to read the words of the terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read- It’s literally two pages. Go read ‘A Letter to America,” Adkins said the video. “And please come back here and just let me know what you think because I feel like I’m going through, like, an existential crisis right now and a lot of people are, so I just need someone else to be feeling this.”

Another TikTok user raeyreads posted the entire letter on her page which received over 640,000 views despite having only 1,300 followers.

“We’ve been lied to our entire lives,” raeyreads wrote Monday. “I remember watching people cheer when Osama was found and killed. I was a child, and it confused me. It still confuses me today. The world deserves better than what this country has done to them. Change must be made.”

Change must be made. It begins with prying Communist China off our phones and away from our kids.

A forced sale or a ban on TikTok is elementary national security. Trump went ahead with it. And yet once there were efforts at passing legislation, TikTok executives managed to buy up AOC, and leftist and some fake right-wing influencers who started screaming that unless we give China access to our phones and kids, we’ll lose our rights.

Commenters who had never commented before here showed up screaming in defense of TikTok.

And you know the rest of the story. TikTok survived. I’m not sure America will.

Giving our leading geopolitical foe direct access to much of our population and the opportunity to program our kids in real time is a hell of a move.

“TikTok is going to save this generation,” Adkins said. “The amount of things that we’ve learned on this app in this past month alone that other people in other generations I tried to talk to them about it, they don’t understand. They don’t get it because they’ve been literally so programmed to think a certain way TikTok is undoing all of that. It’s crazy to watch in real time.”

What’s crazy is that we’re letting them do this.

If we can’t ban TikTok, then why bother fighting? Forget standing up for Taiwan, the South China Sea or Hawaii. We can’t even manage to stand up for our kids and our country. And the moment we do, some paid influencers will take a few hundred bucks to take a break from pushing Osama bin Laden to warn that Chinese Communist spyware must be protected from government interference.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Chinese Operatives Ran A Massive TikTok Campaign To Help Dems In The Midterm Elections

  • TikTok accounts operating on behalf of Chinese state media published content that criticized Republicans and favored Democrats ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, a Forbes investigation found.
  • Despite TikTok rules requiring accounts to disclose their government ties, at least three Chinese government-affiliated accounts with millions of views did not clearly describe their status to users.
  • “This opens a new dimension for conversation about TikTok,” Conor Healy, director of government research at surveillance research group IPVM, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

TikTok accounts operating as voices of Chinese state media promoted messages that appeared to denigrate Republican candidates and favor Democratic ones ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, according to a Forbes investigation.

While the Chinese-owned social media app has verbally affirmed the need to crack down on election disinformation and foreign interference, several news-oriented accounts failed to disclose their affiliation with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state-owned media on the platform, Forbes found. The accounts racked up tens of millions views on posts that covered divisive topics, such as abortion and race, as well as critical clips that mostly targeted Republican candidates ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“This opens a new dimension for conversation about TikTok,” Conor Healy, director of government research at surveillance research group IPVM, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The accounts are managed by MediaLinks TV, which registered as a foreign agent for China with the Treasury Department in 2019 and distributes the U.S. branch of China Central Television (CCTV), CGTN, according to the company’s LinkedIn page. MediaLinks also operates the CCTV and CGTN apps, according to Apple.

The largest accounts are @Panadorama, @The…Optimist and @NewsTokss, the latter of which expressly covers U.S. national news, according to Forbes.

NewsTokss in particular ran content that overall shone Republican politicians in an unfavorable light and praised Democrats, Forbes found.

A video from July was introduced with the caption “Cruz, Abbott Don’t Care About Us,” referring to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, according to Forbes. Another from October criticized Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for having “Done Absolutely Nothing.”

Some content swayed against Democrats; one NewsTokss video in October asked viewers whether President Joe Biden’s promise to enshrine abortion rights served as a “political manipulation tactic,” Forbes found.

None of the videos clearly disclosed their ties to CGTN or the Chinese government, but the accounts’ profile bios did spell out, “Material distributed by MediaLinks TV LLC on behalf of CCTV. More info at DOJ, D.C.,” Forbes reported.

“That’s not disclosure,” Healy said. Between May 8 and July 6, NewsTokss received 8.3 million views but only 57,600 profile views, suggesting many users who watched the videos may not have realized a foreign government was pushing the content, Forbes reported.

Further, by redirecting users to the Department of Justice (DOJ), MediaLinks shrouded its status as a foreign agent.

However, such high-profile accounts should be easily identifiable as state-run, Healy argued to the DCNF.

“Either they don’t care and don’t have the protocols in place to deal with this, or they’re letting it happen,” he said.

In September, TikTok announced a new pilot policy of “mandatory verification for accounts belonging to governments, politicians, and political parties through the midterm elections” in November.

“We plan to introduce our state-controlled media policy and corresponding labels globally next year as part of our continued focus on media literacy,” a spokesperson for TikTok told Forbes.

Chinese company ByteDance owns TikTok, causing suspicion that the company takes orders or signals from the CCP and prompting politicians to call for banning the app across the federal government.

Technology and China researchers have long expressed concerns about China’s election interference via social media content; cybersecurity firm Recorded Future warned ahead of the 2018 midterm elections found Chinese-run accounts “disseminating breaking news and biased content surrounding President Trump and China-related issues.”

CGTN did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

MICAELA BURROW

Reporter.

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A sin to be born Hindu in Bangladesh: Social media sensation Samonty Shoumi abused online

A Bangladeshi social media sensation in a recent interview exposed the extent of online hate, bigotry, abuse and chilling threats from Muslims she had to endure, all because of her religious identity. Hundreds of people not only used unspeakable profanity against her and her family, but also the Gods she prayed to. Some even left threats describing how they would molest her. The virtual terror unleashed upon her not only wrecked her mental wellbeing, but made her second guess every aspect of her identity and life in Bangladesh. Is it a sin to be born as a Hindu in Bangladesh? She recounts that she couldn’t sleep for days.

While speaking with Manju Ahmad, anchor of a Bangladeshi talk show, the celebrated TikToker Samonty Shoumi stated that she had posted a video of herself at the Durga Puja Pandal on the seventh day of Durga Puja this year. In response, Muslims, who had so far been unaware of her religious background, hurled unimaginable abuse at her, including: “You are a sub-human”; “You Hindu whore”; “F*ck you and f*ck your fake idol-worshipping religion”; “Dirty Hindu maid,” and so on. There were choicest of obscenities, very descriptive ones, for the Hindu Goddess Durga as well. While most of the expletives were beeped out on the show, we have tried to provide the closest possible translations of the Bengali slang. Apart from these, in numerous comments people said that they were unfollowing her upon learning that she was a Hindu. Muslims, irrespective of gender or age, tagged each other, directing people in their network to unfollow her because she was a Hindu. Samonty further revealed that around a thousand people unfollowed her that day.

In response to the Islamic attack, Samonty said that she was raised in Bangladesh, but it never occurred to her that she didn’t belong there; she has, however, now been introduced to the jihadi side of the society of which she is a part. Looking into the camera, she asserted that she took extreme pride in the family she was born into and the religion she belonged to. She emphasized that it was not Hindus who carried explosives onto a plane, and pointed out that the recent attacks on the Hindus were carried out for alleged blasphemy against Islam, though everyone knows now who is the real culprit was (a Muslim man, Iqbal Hossain, placed a Quran at a Durga Puja pavilion, triggering an anti-Hindu pogrom in Bangladesh).

Samonty is not the first Bangladeshi celebrity to be harassed for not being a Muslim. All hell broke loose when National Award-winning actor Chanchal Chowdhury posted a picture of him with his mother on Mother’s Day this year. As he has a religiously ambiguous name, most people had no idea he was a Hindu. However, the bright vermillion on his mother’s hair partition (a sign of matrimony worn by Hindu women) gave away his religious affiliation. Rabid religious fanatics came out of the virtual woodwork to spew vitriol against him and hurl revolting epithets at his mother. Some suggested that he must convert to Islam, while others explained how every human being is born a Muslim, but goes astray after he starts worshipping idols.

Things are not very different either for Hindu sportsmen in Bangladesh. A couple of years ago, Hindu cricketer Liton Das drew massive hate for being a Hindu after he shared good wishes for Durga Puja on social media. Some Bangladeshi Muslims can get remarkably creative with their slurs. One Md Metun stated that the status of the Hindu goddess Durga was lower than that of a strand of a fur on a dog’s paw in a Muslim’s home (domesticating dogs is haram in Islam). Liton was compelled to concede and take down the picture featuring good wishes for Durga Puja.

Interestingly, in portraying itself as a sad, hapless, underprivileged South Asian country struggling with lack of educational and medical infrastructure, Bangladesh has received massive grants from international welfare bodies. But beyond that pity-arousing surface, Bangladesh is home to hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have no interest in the growth of their country. Their efforts are all directed toward hating non-Muslims, forming massive mobs and ransacking Hindu villages, putting up fake stories of blasphemy by Hindus, and then attacking them. If they are not able to attack anyone physically, these religious zealots quench their fanaticism by hounding non-Muslims online. It is funny because just a couple of forefathers ago, this entire demography was a Hindu civilization converted to Islam through the application of force or fear, by some Muslim invader or the other from across Asia.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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TOPIC: TikTok: Communist China’s Latest Breach of Freedom

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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Daniel’s original biweekly column appears at Front Page Magazine and his blog articles regularly appear at Family Security Matters, the Jewish Press, Times of Israel, Act for America and Right Side News, as well as daily at the Canada Free Press and a number of other outlets. The scope of Daniel’s writing covers everything from domestic American politics to creeping Islamism in Scotland and how foreign aid makes its way into the hands of terrorists to white aborigines in Australia, Islamist Imams in Libya, flogging in the Maldives and the hunt for witches in the Muslim world.

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