At Wednesday’s fiery presidential debate, former South Carolina Governor and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley blasted censorship-loving tech platform TikTok as “one of the most dangerous social media apps that we can have.”
“China knows exactly what they’re doing,” Haley declared. “150 million people are on TikTok. That means they can get your contacts; they can get your financial information; they can get your emails; they can get text messages; they can get all of these things. China knows exactly what they’re doing.”
Haley’s warning echoes the concern of national security experts. TikTok’s parent company ByteDance — which is partially controlled by three Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entities — has been caught aggressively surveilling its users and hoarding a staggering amount of personal data. Under Articles 7 and 14 of China’s authoritarian intelligence laws, ByteDance is obligated to turn this data over to the genocidal regime of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping whenever he requests it.
As Former Deputy National Security Advisor KT McFlarland explained to MRC Free Speech America in March, “that doesn’t just mean that they [the Chinese government] have access to your emails. They have access to your camera, for example, when you think it’s turned off. They have access to your address book.”
Former Defense Intelligence Community Member Scott Kieff reiterated that “[TikTok is] very much authentically part of a foreign state that has shown itself and declared itself to use networks like this both to gather [data] and to influence.” He added that the platform is used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “to sow dissension and disintegration of social, political and economic fabric.”
TikTok is infamous for its ultra-aggressive censorship of speech critical of socialism. In addition to erasing individual videos, the Media Research Center (MRC)’s CensorTrack database has identified eleven high profile accounts that were entirely banned from the platform for speaking out against leftist ideology. This list included anti-communist education group PragerU; anti-abortion groups Student for Life, Live Action, and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America; Daily Wire host Michael Knowles; and MRCTV.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
