TikTok's logo on a stand at The First International Artificial Products Expo Hangzhou on October 18, 2019 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China.
TikTok's director of creator community brushed aside allegations of Chinese influence on the social media app Tuesday, as the app faces a U.S. national security investigation.
The U.S. government announced earlier this month that it was opening a national security investigation into TikTok's parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, after U.S. lawmakers expressed concern that the Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content, and raising questions about how it stores personal data.
Since then, TikTok executives have embarked on a campaign to refute the allegations. In an extensive profile published earlier this month, TikTok's chief executive Alex Zhu emphasized the autonomy of TikTok's U.S. operation from the headquarters in Beijing.
TikTok's director of creator community Kudzi Chikumbu on Tuesday echoed the words of his chief in an interview with Wilfred Frost and Courtney Reagan on CNBC's Closing Bell.
"We don't remove content based on sensitivities around China or other governments," he said. "What we're focused on is building a platform where people can express themselves freely, be creative, be joyful and that's kind of the main direction that's led to the growth of TikTok."
As he appeared on the show, the Washington Post reported that a 17-year-old user in New Jersey, Feroza Aziz, was locked out of her account after she posted a viral video criticizing the Chinese government's treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority. The Chinese government's discriminatory treatment of the country's Muslim Uighur population is well documented.
Representatives from TikTok confirmed to CNBC that the user has been locked out of her account, but said it is not a matter of censorship as the video in question is still on the platform.
"TikTok does not moderate content due to political sensitivities," a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. "A previous account belonging to this user had been banned after she posted a video of Osama Bin Laden, which is a violation of TikTok's ban on content that includes imagery related to terrorist organizations. Another account of hers, @getmefamouspartthree, and its videos – including the eyelash video in question – were not affected and the video continues to receive views."
But, in an interview with the Post, Aziz said the reference to bin Laden was a "joke." And it clearly was, here's the video that Aziz was locked out for:
nova9001 on November 27th, 2019 at 06:40 UTC »
And all these people are so addicted to it they can't stop using it just like every social media.
cr0ft on November 27th, 2019 at 06:36 UTC »
It's not really complicated.
"Beijing-based company" = "owned and operated by the Chinese government" in almost every way. When your government can annihilate your company with ease, and literally disappear you into a concentration camp if you don't do what you're told, you do what you're told.
There may not be any official or overt links between Tiktok and the Chinese government, but to believe their spiel about this not being a politically motivated ban you'd have to be a drooling moron.
Tiktok is almost certainly more or less a part of the Chinese intelligence apparatus; let's not forget they're building the most draconian surveillance and oppression based society ever seen on the face of the Earth, with their "social score" that is already preventing people from travel and many other things.
It's also only a matter of time before Hong Kong gets its own Tiananmen Square incident, and eventually - when China finally realizes that the US is not even a paper tiger anymore, it's a clown car being driven by an orange lunatic - they'll bomb Taiwan into the stone age and take that over as well.
Retarded_Rick on November 27th, 2019 at 04:35 UTC »
Makes you think, tiktok has heaps of people on it making it very easy for China to find out when where and what people are doing