China’s Biggest Weapon Against the West: Your Teen’s Phone. By Equedia.
I’m about to expose the biggest stealth propaganda operation in history. It’s so invasive that it has already incited deadly coups in three countries. And it’s all being led by the new powerhouse: China.
If you think Americans aren’t at risk, consider this: The Chinese already hooked 80 million kids in the U.S. without them or their parents realizing it. …
TikTok [is] the Chinese social network where people create and share short mobile videos in which they dance, lip-sync, sing, or otherwise have fun.
It started as a humble dancing app in 2014. But as it gained popularity globally, the app was bought out by CCP-controlled Chinese tech giant ByteDance, fed into its classified A.I. engine, and reintroduced to the global market.
Immediately, TikTok took the world by storm. This year, TikTok became the most downloaded app on the internet, beating even Instagram and Facebook. Over a billion people use it every month — that’s one-quarter of all adults outside of China. …
So addictive:
TikTok is so engaging that nine out of 10 users visit the social network daily. And on average, they spend around 5-7% of their all waking time on this app.
If those numbers don’t say anything to you, let’s just say that this Chinese social media beats all addictiveness records that Facebook, Instagram, or any other Western social network has ever achieved.
The secret sauce?
It doesn’t let users choose what they want to see, for the most part.
Instead, its secret algorithm serves you an infinite reel of videos tailored to your likings based on all the data they acquire (more on that later). …
What it’s collecting on your children:
As soon as you download the app, ByteDance — and by extension, the CCP — can see your location (at hourly intervals), contacts, all apps, files, and active subscriptions. … TikTok has 100% visibility into your clipboard. It can monitor and store your keystrokes, including passwords you type out on the phone. …
Despite constantly denying it, ByteDance is sending all that data back to China. …
What it’s feeding your children:
Last month, Bloomberg received an anonymous tip from someone on the U.S. TikTok team.
The scoop leaked a private request from a Chinese government agency made back in 2020 to open a “stealth” account on American TikTok to showcase “the best side of China” … For obvious reasons, the request was flagged and denied by the government relations team.
So, the CCP came up with a workaround. Instead of pushing its content onto the existing algorithm, they decided to tilt the algorithm itself by introducing a new algo regulation and forcing ByteDance to comply with it.
At the end of last year, CCP introduced a law that specifically regulates “recommendation algorithms” just like the one that drives TikTok …
In effect, the regulation calls on Chinese internet companies to unveil their classified algorithms to the government and adjust them as they please to comply with “mainstream values.” …
TikTok serves different content in China than in the U.S. …
In China, TikTok shows educational clips about science and achievements. At the same time, American kids are fed the shallowest, mind-numbing entertainment, such as funny pet videos, comical mishaps — as well as extremist political content.
In other words, China is pursuing the systematic polarization and dumbing down of American culture. …
Bot army to influence opinion:
It’s no wonder there are multitudes of complaints about massive bot activity on TikTok …
Not only can the CCP feed whatever it pleases to people across the world, it can rally its army of bots to engage with its content to shape public opinion in its favor – very much like Twitter has been used for spreading Chinese propaganda and spreading COVID news.
TikTok has already caused unrest in non-Chinese Asia:
Consider the unrest in Southeast Asia that TikTok’s algorithm unintentionally incited over a couple of years.
“In Southeast Asia, people used TikTok to express political opinions, and later such dissent transformed into movements that led to offline protests,” Jalli, assistant professor at Northern State University told Newsweek.
“This happened in Indonesia during the Omnibus Law protests in 2020, Malaysia in 2021, Thailand during the Youth Protests in 2020, and Myanmar Military Coup Protests early this year.” …
US:
The social network has been one of the main hubs of political dissent during the Black Lives Matter movement. In the heat of it, the #blacklivesmatter hashtag generated a crazy 4.9 billion views on TikTok.
What could China gain from inciting racism, violence, and divisiveness in the U.S.? You can figure that one out. …
Trump and Republicans were onto it, but Hunter Biden’s dad turned it back to China:
Back in 2020, Trump warned about TikTok. And before leaving office, he invoked a 45-day grace period for ByteDance to sell and spin it off to a U.S. company — otherwise, the social network would be banned.
Later, ByteDance filed an injunction with a district court, which was approved. Then Trump gave up office to Biden, who immediately signed an executive order to revoke the ban. …
In the end, ByteDance successfully stonewalled Republicans’ efforts to ban TikTok.
And here we are two years later, TikTok is on every teenager’s phone, successfully conditioning the future voters of our country.
