Its pure speculation but i suspect china may have purposely pushed for the tiktok is spyware narrative and fueled the china bad bandwagon themselves.
They mad it a real privacy nightmare but also by made sure western leaders know it is a privacy nightmare.
Something i noted is that European parlement and many individual European govs have in recent years put up laws banning tiktok for gov officials and all staff but not the general public/citizens.
Honestly this just sounds like more conspiracy theory than fact. Remember Occam’s Razor, the simplest solution is usually correct.
Like don’t get me wrong, TikTok is absolutely an extension of soft power, and it’s likely that the Chinese government has access to the huge amount of data the platform collects. But I think anything beyond that is just not likely.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 1 day ago
you know you can just…stop typing after that, right?
you’re making the same racist assumption that underlies the TikTok ban itself - that Chinese people are inherently nefarious, untrustworthy, always hatching schemes and plots and subterfuge.
the US does not need to be “tricked” into passing laws that are rooted in anti-Chinese bigotry. it’s basically a national pastime.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Lol, This implies that Chinese citizens somehow have a say in what their government elite desires. I don’t think they are much different then anyone else.
If it makes you feel better the US puts just as much energy into manipulating other countries as other countries do into them. And may i remind you of the chat control Europe routinely tries to sneak in a ban encryption for all its citizens without them noticing. So not racist, just anti any centralized power structure because power always corrupts.
The fact is that governments have always (amongst other things) been rooted in a centralized resource and population control. The big problem as i would call it is that the emergent complexity of global politics makes the dynamics so complex not a single person, not even a president is capable of knowing more then the micro-environment they exist within. This is precisely why states feel a need to create extensive bureaucracies, specialized agencies which historically have a tendency to evolve into centralized powered structures of themselves and power always corrupts.