‘Happy to provide additional basic facts to you or your staff that I learned in elementary school. Ask anytime,’ California Democrat tells Tom Cotton
Tom Cotton is facing widespread criticism after he asked Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew if had “ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party”.
The Arkansas Republican senator pursued the much-ridiculed line of questioning during a Senate hearing on child safety on social media on Wednesday, which was attended by a number of big tech CEOs such as Mr Chew.
“You said today, as you often say, that you live in Singapore – of what nation are you a citizen?” Mr Cotton asked.
“Singapore,” the CEO responded.
…
“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?” Mr Cotton then asked.
“Senator, I’m Singaporean – no,” Mr Chew responded.
Unable to let the matter go, Mr Cotton asked: “Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?”
“No, senator, again, I’m Singaporean,” the tech CEO said.
It was pretty fucking stupid to ask him those questions. In addition, being a member of the CCP isn’t as big of a deal as this senator is making it out to be. We aren’t living in McCarthyism are we? Are we afraid of ideas?
America is afraid of ideas though. We have a long history of banning ideas from within our borders. By way of example, ideological restrictions on naturalization. We basically didn’t allow people to become citizens if they believed in communism as a valid government structure.
If the CEO of TikTok was born in China and moved to Singapore (or America for that matter), does that preclude him from doing business with America? Why? Are we so insecure as a nation that we must ban an entire country from our internet activity?
I’ll be the first to admit that TikTok - and apps like it - are security vulnerabilities. However, this entire debate has nothing to do with national security. If it were, Meta or X would also be under fire for selling advertising/user data to foreign countries, no? Plenty of these social media companies have entire sectors of their organization providing APIs and SAAS solutions for consuming data. Twitter has something which is essentially a firehose of all tweets being posted in any country that match a search query of yours. Is that not a security risk? It comes with geo information, timestamps, hashtags, urls, etc.
If this is about security, focus on user protections. The EU has shown a lot of promise in this area. I was the first to say “you can’t moderate the internet”, but they’ve done it. If you’ve ever been to a country within the EU in the past 5 years, you’ll notice those “accept/deny cookie” popups are far less spammy and easier to deny. In addition, most companies I’ve worked for in America have adhered to GDPR standards.
I believe we should protect locations, names, birthdays, emails, phone numbers, addresses, etc. Data should be opt-in and not opt-out. Is this hard to mandate? Yes. Of course there are going to be bad actors. But laws should not be written to catch all criminals. They should be written to promote what our society values. Do we value privacy or not?
I’d be far more impressed with a senator questioning tech companies about their data protections and their willingness to agree to not sell user data. But I somehow doubt that’s going to happen in our Congress.
What the fuck? The CCP is no more Communist than North Korea is a Democratic Republic. I don’t give a shit about the CCP’s ideas because there’s only one they seem to care about: power. You can tell because of how they treat their own people. Corporations operating out of China are either controlled by the CCP behind the scenes or their leadership gets disappeared if they get too critical. It’s happened a number of times; ask Jack Ma and several others … if you can find them.
The fucking CCP is every bit as bad as the damned Nazis and anyone that simps for them should go live under their regime. I’m sure you’ll have a great social credit score. Just don’t depict Emperor Xi as Winnie the Pooh or watch the fuck out.
I’m not a CCP apologist, if that’s what you gathered. I believe all corporations in America should be held to the same security standards and requirements to protect consumer information.
I think you might be overlooking my main point: no government should be given American citizen data, including China. We deserve senators who can adequately solve these problems rather than attacking a person based on their vague ethnic associations with a country or countries.
Meta, Twitter/X, Reddit, etc. have been selling data to foreign governments for decades. Just because TikTok is Chinese owned doesn’t mean they’re the only ones guilty. And this senator is shifting the argument from a personal privacy one to a xenophobic one. He’s wasting our time and hurting our ability to achieve material changes in our law that will protect us from the CCP, Russia, Iran, etc.
Then what’s the stuff in your original post about “being afraid of ideas?” Which ideas, exactly, were you referring to? Being nominally Communist and functionally Fascist?
The CCP are not an ethnic or national group, they’re a malevolent political movement and opposing them is the farthest thing from xenophobia. They run China and create untold misery for Chinese citizens. Being originally from Singapore does not mean you’re not working for the CCP and that is absolutely relevant to this situation. Data privacy is one issue, nation state surveillance is another. There are quantitative and qualitative differences between them and both must be addressed. Google, Meta, and Amazon et al need to be reigned in, broken up, and some board members should see jail time. TikTok, (yet another front for the CCP like ALL Chinese Corps), needs to be handled differently and the CCP’s malfeasance should be exposed and talked about.
Compare and contrast Huawei and say, Cisco. Cisco’s equipment is occasionally annoying and bad for consumers and their business practices suck. Huawei equipment is a national security risk. Big difference and you can’t even get into that without referencing the CCP because they’re driving it.
Tom Cotton’s a dipshit and worded the question in the dumbest possible way, but stopped clock, etc.
I’m opposed to their ideology, I’m not afraid of it existing in my borders. This is just the argument of the tolerant of the intolerant and I frankly don’t know where I land on that. I understand the premise, but intolerance seems like a paradoxical way to be tolerant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Already fully fleshed out. Tolerating intolerance breaks the social contract.