Senate hearing highlights: Lawmakers grill CEOs from TikTok, X and Meta about online child safety
Senate hearing highlights: Lawmakers grill CEOs from TikTok, X and Meta about online child safety
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My favorite part...
Tom Cotton: “Have you ever been Chinese?”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: "Senator, I'm Singaporean.”
Tom Cotton: “So that makes you what? Korean?”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: "No.”
Tom Cotton: “Is that because you’re Japanese? Which is just another word for Chinese so you lied!”
Is this a real quote?!?!
Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be, I've listened to a bit (Cotton's testimony starts around 2:20:50 in the linked video, citizenship bullshit comes up around 2:23:45) and Cotton asks the TikTok CEO what nation he's a citizen of, if he's ever applied for Chinese citizenship, does he have a Singaporean passport, does he have any other passports, if his wife and children are American citizens, if he's ever applied for American citzenship, if hes ever been a member of the Chinese communist party, and if he's ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese communist party, before launching off into questions about the Tiananmen Square massacre and the genocide of Uyghurs, but no mention of Japan or Korea that I heard
Still pretty jaw dropping racism by Cotton to ask the Asian guy over and over and over whether he's an agent of the Chinese Communist Party but never ask anyone else up there about that
Unfortunately yes. These are the kind of people that make laws about social networks.
Shit like this is why I can't take the handwringing over Tiktok seriously. Yeah, their company work culture sucks, and social media in general sucks. But so much of the hate toward Tiktok is tinged with xenophobia that it's unreal.
As a network engineer, so many of the arguments for why tiktok is terrible are dismissed because of xenophobia. It's unreal, because it is blatantly obvious that it is just absolutely rummaging through your phone for every last bit of information it can steal about you.
I don't care what nationality the people are that are receiving it, there is no excuse for that shit and you need to get off tiktok.
What's your opinion on facebook and twitter?
From a network engineer perspective, facebook is probably more effective at stealing data, but steals 'less' (still a crapload) data than tiktok (seriously, you would not fucking BELIEVE how much data tiktok constantly sends to the servers). Plus, of course, all the data you give facebook, facebook gets. That said, it's sort of 6 of one, half dozen of another- just because tiktok can't find an actual use for some of the data it's got, doesn't mean it can't or won't later.
Twitter's app doesn't actually steal/exfiltrate all that much data, believe it or not. Most of their trackers and analytics are focused on your use of twitter itself. It's still ran by a psychopathic manchild, however, and they are still, in my opinion, stealing data from you.
Personally, my home wifi has all three blocked via DNS. None of them get my data.
One is run by a psycho, the other by a guy who needs to get off the ketamine and find his big boy pants.
Now seriously: FB is more insidious in its tracking and targeted profiling (lawful evil). Twitter is just negligent and deliberately letting the crazies roam free (chaotic evil).
Is this a real quote?!?!
Unfortunately yes.
This may seem like homer visiting the ceo of kwiki-mart, but really? I can't find anything online mentioning it. Do you have a timestamp or link?
This fits into the middle of the depressingly-plausible/unbelievably-stupid venn diagram and it's really doing my head in.
Shit like this is why I can't take the handwringing over Tiktok seriously. Yeah, their company work culture sucks, and social media in general sucks. But so much of the hate toward Tiktok is tinged with xenophobia that it's unreal.
Yeah, anytime someone says they want to go after TikTok but doesn't have anything to say about any other tech firm's creepiness I stop taking them seriously. We need broad generalizable rules that deal with social media, data brokers, and lots of other issues, but all a lot of people are interested in is finding an excuse to go after something foreign so they can stir up their racist shithead followers.
also conservatives are mad kids can learn about the world and don't like them as a result so they want to institute multipronged censorship of school curricula, libraries and the internet
yea, that part was pretty shambolic, but i cant imagine a republican forgoing a chance to bash the CEO of a company run in part by the CCP when they accuse anyone to the left of trump of being a "communist" ooga booga, lol.
the CEO of a company run in part by the CCP
TikTok is owned by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. However, the company is not actually registered in China, but is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Although ByteDance and TikTok both have offices in China, neither is owned by the ruling Communist party and both insist they are not controlled by the government.
TikTok has offices around the world, with its largest in Los Angeles, California, but whistleblower ex-employees told CNBC that ByteDance was heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the firm, to the extent that American employees had email addresses for both companies.
In November last year, the chair of ByteDance—the company's co-founder Zhang Yiming—stepped down; a move the Guardian said came as the Chinese government tightened its control of China's tech sector and ramped up pressure on its entrepreneur bosses to support the party line.
ByteDance created a new unit in May this year called the Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd to run Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok—and the company has admitted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does indeed own a share of that business.
But the company tweeted that claims ByteDance itself is owned by the CCP "is mistaken... a Chinese state-owned enterprise has a 1% stake in a different ByteDance subsidiary called Beijing Douyin Information Service Limited, not in TikTok's parent company."