This is the best summary I could come up with:
Florida Congressman Neal Dunn’s office told the BBC it has received more than 900 calls from TikTokers, “many of which were vulnerable school-aged children” and some of whose extreme rhetoric had to be flagged for security reasons.
Lawmakers have long accused ByteDance of having links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and have cast the video-sharing app as a potential threat to Americans’ privacy and mental health.
Carlos Gimenez, who sits alongside Mr Dunn on the House committee behind the bill, said he would not be deterred from voting for it “regardless of TikTok’s targeted campaign against members of Congress”.
A spokesperson for New York Democrat Ritchie Torres - a joint leader of the legislation - confirmed that his office too has received “seemingly endless calls” though none were of a threatening nature.
“I am deeply troubled by reports of young people calling Congress, threatening to commit suicide or otherwise harm themselves,” Mr Torres said in a statement to the BBC.
Mr Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, has been outspoken about the national security threat posed by TikTok and is supportive of the proposed bill, “so it’s certainly possible that our office is targeted because of those things”, his spokesperson added.
The original article contains 712 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Sounds like a backfire to me. Did you read the article? The lobbying was from TikTok to prevent the bill from passing, but it sounds like it just made the reps more committed to passing it.
The irony of their efforts is that it only proved to show that they could easily begin influencing users which is the key argument being used against them.
I’m still not sure what my feelings on the subject are. I don’t use the app myself, but besides its connection to a company in China and, therefore, the Chinese government, it seems to do the same exact tracking and algorithm manipulating that every other social network does.
TikTok has always been on the extreme end of tracking and surveilling its users. For example, research found that the app had the ability to record all keystrokes made by users in the in-app browser (i.e. keylogging). This kind of tracking is way beyond what other social media companies do and borders on malware.That’s one reason why the US, Canada, and others banned the use of TikTok on government devices.
A former TikTok employee also alleges in a sworn statement that TikTok stores its user data in China, that the CCP has full access to this data, and that the CCP used this data to spy on protestors in Hong Kong.
So their tracking goes way beyond what other companies do, and China uses that data for expressly political goals rather than simply selling ads to users.
Does Facebook not also do that? I remember there being some controversy a few years ago about them logging statuses that were typed out, but ultimately not posted.
The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”
There’s a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app’s browser is much worse than measuring a true or false “did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted.”
Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.
But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.
logging statuses that were typed out, but ultimately not posted.
That’s common practice across the web. For example in a lot of social networks (not Lemmy) if I were to close this reply box without clicking the “Reply” button, I’d simply be able to open it and my half written reply would be restored.
It’s not about gathering data on users, it’s about saving users from accidental deletion particularly on touch screens where it’s so easy to accidentally brush the wrong button.
Also I’d argue anything you intentionally type into a facebook status message box, is something you’re happy to share with facebook and everyone on your social network. There’s no expectation of privacy and we self sensor what we type into that box.
Logging key strokes is different, there’s no reason to record that anything you record (other than actually typing messages) is likely to be something the user intended to type somewhere else but didn’t realise which browser window had keyboard focus.
They would be picking up all kinds of things including passwords.
I definitely see issues with how it targets young people so aggressively and can have a huge negative impact on their mental health. China can essentially use it as a tool to lower the mental health of our youth and spread misinformation on purpose. The fact that the version available in China emphasizes educational content and limits usage per day shows that they know exactly what they are doing with the international versions.
Ties not just to “a company in China”, but directly to the Chinese government.
For better or worse, and how other US platforms operate, Tik Tok is controlled by a hostile (to the US) nation state.
Keep in mind that China also blocks many US company products/platforms for their own reasons, so this is not at all a surprise.
But smoking is ok
I stay largely uninvolved with social media apps outside of this fediverse project, but why is it that bytedance must divest TikTok while meta is free to keep Facebook and Instagram? Aren’t the risks to mental health and security the same?
Meta isn’t heavily influenced by a government adversarial to that of the US, so the risks to US security are not the same.
The mental health risk looks pretty similar, though.
I remember two decades ago when the US was screaming about the “great firewall of China” and how they should open up their internet to companies like Google. What made the US change their mind since then?
They didn’t? The CCP happily allows the export of potentially nefarious internet products, but they still don’t allow the uncensored internet in.
