Tiktok's content/users is strongly favorably towards Palestine/against Israel. That's all you need to know to understand why they are trying to ban tiktok now.
UK, Canada, Australia, India, among others, have all had some sort of a ban in place for a while.
... exclusively on government devices.
Suddenly Congress' 500+ members come together like a bipartisan Voltron to draft, vote and pass a bill about Tiktok, matching the speed and urgency of military aid bills for foreign countries? When there is a much more domestically significant border security bill that's been stuck for months, in an election year?
It doesn't add up. Congress can make a case for the military aid, it hasn't made one for TT.
"While the ratio fluctuated, he found that at times it ran 69 to 1 in favor of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags."
Seeing a Israeli lobby group mention TikTok in November last year correlates well with the sudden heightened interest in shutting Tiktok down and replacing it with a pseudo Tiktok.
The organic support amoung teens for Palestine is a national security threat.
"While the ratio fluctuated, he found that at times it ran 69 to 1 in favor of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags."
Israels professional misinformation arm works well on those platforms but for some reason has not been as effective on TikTok evident by how big the pro-Palestine plight is amoung US teens.
Israeli leadership has recently met with TikTok and ads have been put up looking for Hebrew-speaking moderators. A guess would be that it’s _not_ to censor pro-Palestinian activists as much as it is to regulate Israeli content that might “give a bad look”.
It turns out ivermectin actually really does statistically improve COVID outcomes, but only in places where it is common for people to have parasitic infections.
So there is a truth, but there is also a greater more true truth. It might be true that TikTok was drumming up support for Israel and that's "why" it was banned. On the other hand, the genocide that is definitely happening in Gaza is (rightly) de-legitimizing to the ruling party in Washington and threatens to demoralize their voters, opening up the US to a candidate who has been very clear about ending democracy and constitutional rule.
So while it could be that china supports Gaza in a meaningful way (which I very much doubt given their own genocides), it could also be that China is attempting to further agitate political divides and cause chaos. I find it much more believable that China is promoting those stories to hurt the US than to help Gaza.
One thing that always seems to be a given, and never challenged (in this narrative) is that China is "boosting" pro-palestine content. However, it seems to me that TikTok is working neutrally, "as designed", and that pro-palestine content is actually popular among TikTok's demographic. China isn't boosting pro-palestine content anymore than they do Love is Blind.
I say this because Meta has been accused by the Human Rights Watch[1] of censoring palestine content, and banning TikTok here has subtle big brother vibes here. ByteDance may not "get with the program" and that spells trouble for American soft-power. It's interesting to frame American censorship this way; it's not that America is "censoring" anything, it's that $COUNTRY is "boosting" $CONTENT.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Can you tell me why you think China promoting stories of Gazan citizens suffering, hurts the US?
I am open to believing it's to provoke engagement and therefore profit which makes TikTok no better than American social media and an agent that profits from the suffering of Gazans.
I am open to believing it's to try to further drive dissatisfaction with our government that is wrongly supporting Israel (likely for realpolitik reasons that can't be openly discussed, which still don't justify our support of genocide).
I am not at all open to believing it's because China has any empathy for Gazan citizens or belief that genocide is wrong. The "One Israel" policy robs Gazans of statehood. Lack of statehood is a key ingredient to genocide. China has the One China policy explicitly to rob Taiwanese of statehood and therefore make them vulnerable to genocide and/or justify their colonization efforts (as seen in tibet, xinjiang, and hong kong).
It very well might be that the US government wants to be able to force their support for genocide and see TikTok as an agent of resistance. That is the small truth. The big truth is that TikTok is a credible threat to American security, a threat China sees as so big that they enacted a ban on foreign social media within their borders with a major and society effecting piece of engineering.
The point is that TikTok is like a gun, it is a gun in our enemies hands. It is a gun in the hands of an enemy that is building an army to be used against us. It is a gun in the hands of an entity that has repeatedly and openly said they are willing to do the same thing Israel is doing to Gaza, to Taiwan.
I strongly do not believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
It's never that your unsubstantiated claims are wrong, its that you can never, ever, ever, be wrong, isn't that right?