Time for TikTok to cut its ties to China

Is TikTok just straight up lying in the their official press release or is this just hysteria by our legislators?

> We store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law.

> Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked. Period.

> Our US moderation team, which is led out of California, reviews content for adherence to our US policies – just like other US companies in our space. We are not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government.

Like TikTok is bending over backwards here https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-about/ Facebook refused to do something similar to this for the EU because of the NSA and they're our allies! Is there literally anything they could say that would make people believe that being owned by a Chinese company is not the same as being puppeted by the CCP?

My concern is with forced sales. How do we ensure that the politicians’ incentives matches with ours and that they aren’t being paid behind our backs by the companies that are now able to acquire TikTok at a discount? Congress is notorious for (alleged) insider trading, they could very well profit from such a sale.

Relevant: The American Trap by Frederic Pierucci

On the other hand, they’re ostensibly a democracy, albeit one where only one party has significant political power. (For a country with the level of economic success that they do, maybe it’s understandable.) Singapore has an extremely low level of corruption on international indexes, even lower than in the US, and it’s seen as very business friendly.

Another thing to note, as I am learning more about it, is the extensive surveillance framework that is already available. (I’m about halfway through Byron Tau’s Means of Control now.) Surveilling people’s whereabouts is trivial, and for a nation state like China or the US it’s often easier to just buy information on the open market than allocate an agency to the task.

My final thought on this is that we’ve heard for so long about how private platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content how they see fit. There are two cases in front of SCOTUS about this now. While I think this is a comfortably simple point of view, it elevates the speech of fundamentally profit-seeking entities to the same level of protection as that of everyday people. Once we start to block companies based on national security, we need to consider the ownership of other companies as well. Nothing is to stop Elon Musk from taking a bribe from a foreign adversary in a moment of drug-fueled weakness, and that bribe from affecting Twitter’s ranking algorithm.

"TikTok in talks to acquire steak in TruthSocial."