On TikTok, American politicians are so old, so out of touch that…



Kettle.Pot.Black

Some USA politicians are terrified by tweens bopping on TikTok. They fear Xi Jinping could arbitrarily compel the omipotent ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok application to provide user data. (But who is @BunnieFog555. She looks five.) In the alternative they say they fear Beijing might exploit TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm as a methodology for targeted propaganda. This would be like China copying U.S. electioneers manipulating elections and nations like the Philippines and both African and South American republics. How? They use American internet company’s data algorithms to win elections or gain favourable outcomes for the U.S. interest.

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“To be extremely clear, this legislation is aimed squarely at companies like Kaspersky, Huawei, and TikTok that create systemic risks to the United States’ national security—not at individual users,” say the authors of a Bill to authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes. Congress S.686

Under the terms of the bill, someone must be engaged in ‘sabotage or subversion’ of American communications technology products and services, creating ‘catastrophic effects’ on U.S. critical infrastructure, or ‘interfering in, or altering the result’ of a federal election, in order to be eligible for any kind of criminal penalty …

(The real scary people: Mr. Warner (for himself, Mr. Thune, Ms. Baldwin, Mrs. Fischer, Mr. Manchin, Mr. Moran, Mr. Bennet, Mr. Sullivan, Mrs. Gillibrand, Ms. Collins, Mr. Heinrich, Mr. Romney, and Mrs. Capito) introduced the  bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.)