A federal judge in Montana has blocked an upcoming state-wide ban on using the social media app TikTok, calling it unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy said Thursday the ban on the app, whose ownership has ties to Communist-led China, “oversteps state power and infringes on the Constitutional right of users and businesses.”
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Has the TikTok Left just jumped the shark?
Well, yes. Imagine seizing on Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” as a revelation to justify your wounded adolescent narcissism and historical ignorance? This past week, a bunch of videos from the Chinese owned data-hoovering and propaganda-peddling app took the meme-world by storm by showering some love on the defunct Islamic terrorist and kicking America in the process. Quoth one fragile female as she brushed her teeth: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” Another client of this new experiment in juvenile mind control bleated that the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks taught her that America was a “plague on the entire world.”
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Videos showing people reading Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter justifying the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon went viral Wednesday evening, prompting a media outlet to delete its translation of the document.
The Guardian deleted the letter Wednesday after it had been active on the site since being published on Nov. 24, 2002, directing readers to an article from that date about the letter. Videos on the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok showed users reading the letter, Rolling Stone reported.
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TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance’s personnel can allegedly view the private connections of a vast array of politicians, Forbes reported on Wednesday.
TikTok has a social graph tool that reveals connections of individuals including members of President Joe Biden’s family, governors, senators and state attorneys general, Forbes reported. Other social media companies have access to similar data but TikTok has fewer barriers for employees to view it and more personal information available for them to draw from, according to individuals who have worked for multiple tech firms who spoke to Forbes.
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Some employees at the popular social media platform TikTok are concerned about the influence the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has on the company as executives from its parent, ByteDance, take on new positions, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A number of high-level executives from ByteDance in China have taken on new roles at TikTok’s U.S. operation, with employees complaining internally that there may be greater CCP influence than what is being publicly disclosed, according to the WSJ. The China-based ByteDance is subject to CCP regulation and can be pressured by the government to hand over information that the company has collected, which has in the past raised concerns over whether American users of the app are having their data collected by the foreign government.
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In a second GOP presidential debate that often seemed more like a disorderly reality TV show, the Babylon Bee’s satirical news headline may have best captured the mood of viewers: ‘Mute Button’ Wins GOP Debate.
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Elon Musk said Monday that the Anti-Defamation League pushed X, social media platform formally known as Twitter, to shut down the popular Libs of TikTok account.
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Meta recently took “what appears to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world,” off its platforms, according to the company’s quarterly Adversarial Threat Report released this week.’
The social media accounts that made up the covert influence operation — collectively dubbed “Spamouflage” — were active all over the world, including in America, major U.S. allies, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora.
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ByteDance, the CCP-linked parent company of popular shortform video platform TikTok, is trying to enter the book publishing industry, The New York Times reported Saturday.
The company filed in late April for a U.S. trademark for a publishing firm, 8th Note Press, and has already begun reaching out to some independent authors for the rights to sell their books, the NYT reported. TikTok has helped some books become bestsellers in the past several years, posts using the #Booktok hashtag have been viewed more than 91 billion times and the combined sales of 100 authors with large BookTok followings eclipsed $760 million in 2022, a 60% surge from the year prior.
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It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files — the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship — was first published. Twitter Files One, perhaps the mildest of more than 20 unique reports, details the social media company’s internal deliberations in the days before the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was removed from the site. Later reports have exposed the tendrils of a governmental apparatus that influenced some of the most significant media distortions in recent American history, from the fraudulent Hamilton 68 misinformation tracking dashboard to the FBI’s intimate involvement with Twitter’s content-moderation practices.
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