Are New Trump Pal Tik-Tok Owners Going To Monitor Undesirables?
Guess we should not be surprised!
At midnight, TikTok switched over to its new domestic ownership and its Larry Ellison-controlled algorithm, overseen by an almost-all American board of Trump pals. This is surely among the most powerful of the regime’s media captures. While you may not use the app, about 37 percent of Americans did at some point last year, and it’s especially popular with the youths: 60 percent of TikTok’s 26.5 million US monthly active users are between the ages of 16 and 24. And it is more addictive than a crack-laced Marlboro: The average user spends 68 minutes on the app at a time.
Now the forecast calls for a deluge of eerily realistic AI slop and right-wing propaganda forced onto everybody’s feed and suppression of progressive voices, sure, but also so much worse than that. Check the new terms of service showing an intention to track every user:
Information You Provide may include sensitive personal information, as defined under applicable state privacy laws, such as information from users under the relevant age threshold, information you disclose in survey responses or in your user content about your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information. For example, we may process your financial information in order to provide you the goods or services you request from us or your driver’s license number in order to verify your identity. We may also collect precise location data, depending on your settings and as explained below. We process such sensitive personal information in accordance with applicable law, such as for permitted purposes under the California Consumer Privacy Act.
Unless some state law prevents it, anything they can find out about you can and will be used against you! Sure, all apps track you with cookies and stuff, but there is something curiously specific about that-all.
Film ICE and post it? Perhaps they will track you to your door and blind you with pepper spray! Talk about your trans journey? God only knows how that could be used to dox and torture a person. Remember how Republicans lied that TikTok was being used to spy on Americans by GUYNUHHH? Projecting again! Now the UAE, investment companies, and Larry Ellison’s Oracle will be patriotically spying on users instead.
And while AI may not be replacing jobs in corporate America, it’s created a new gig for the willing: TikTok AI slopmaker! Cut and paste any script (even get AI to write it), record an anthropomorphic bot saying it, and you could make about 40 cents to a dollar per 1,000 views longer than a minute. Throw in brand partnerships and sponsorships, and TikToking can make millions. And while AI is supposed to be labeled on the app, the label can be real tiny. A new generation of little James O’Keefes like Nick Shirley, or slop-prompters like whoever made that racist horror for Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, will be boosted to new eyeballs, and new fortunes.
MAGA social media outreach is all coming together now. Be prepared to see realistic videos of whatever the MAGA mind can imagine and then some: immigrants barbecuing pets while doing crimes, ANTIFAs weeping while being arrested, Taylor Swift cooing that she thinks MAGA men are sexy. Whatever the new, domestic, MAGA-friendly moderation team will allow (assuming any moderation will exist).
And after the nativist chest-pounding Republicans did to get TikTok sold, the new board is still not quite all American: The Emirati investment firm MGX has a seat/15 percent voting rights, too.
And Singaporean-born Shou Chew is no longer the CEO, though still on the board as a director. Guess MAGA finally figured out that he is not from China, a whole other country. Remember when he testified before Congress and Republican reps and Tom Cotton in the Senate humiliated themselves with their spectacular ignorance?
Now the CEO shall be TikTok’s former head of operations and a former executive at Warner Brothers, Adam Presser, and other investors include Vice President JD Vance’s former firm Revolution, and tech executive/Trump humper Michael Dell’s family investment office.
In hindsight, it couldn’t be any clearer that all along the point of BANNING TikTok was to wrest control of the company, and the CHINESE GOVERNMENT SPYING line was always a lie. But the entire Authoritarian Capitalist government-engineered takeover of a private company has never been done in America like this before, outside of, like, supplies factories in wartime.
And it was all based on lies! ByteDance was incorporated in the Cayman Islands, not China, and TikTok Inc. was headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore. Sixty percent of ByteDance had already been owned by non-Chinese global institutional investors; the servers with the algorithm and Americans’ user data had always been dispensed from a server farm in Virginia owned by Larry Ellison’s Oracle. And ByteDance’s majority shareholder was Susquehanna International Group, headed by Jeff Yass, remember him? He was the guy who helped Trump take TruthSocial public and get a $3.5 billion hot cash injection while the State of New York was breathing down his neck for bond money from his frauding, tax-dodging behind! Susquehanna still has a seat too, of course.
If you are on TikTok, opt out of tracking in settings, for what it may be worth. Stick to “following” feed and be wary of the “for you” feed. There are plenty of legitimate sources to follow, like foreign news services. Long-press AI slop and MAGA videos to mark NOT INTERESTED.
Or better yet, get off, get off of it completely!
Okay fine, just 15 more minutes of goodbye scrolling. Maybe 30, so you can download your favorite videos.
But that’s it! Now get off that filth app and go touch grass!
Wonkette has no institutional investors BUT YOU.
Does ANYone think they're not going to?
A police state requires eternal surveillance.
Carney's speech will be taught in schools as the beginning of a new world order.
People noticed.
***
According to Washington Post analyst Ishaan Tharoor, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s star has risen to dizzying heights after his speech at which he made the point, “Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”
He later added, “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
According to the Post, Carney made a huge impression that led longtime German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger to hail the speech and report, “There are some people who are now saying, ‘why can’t we invite Canada to be a member of the E.U.?’"
Adam Tooze, who was the moderator when Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick answered questions, agreed and admitted, “It was the only one of the leader speeches that I saw that, with weight and moral earnestness, expressed the shock which many of us are feeling here.”
Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, joined the praise, explaining, “We know that it reflects a change in the global order that we’ve almost all seen coming increasingly over the past years, but no major government leader was prepared to actually say it,” and then predicting, “people are going to be thinking back on [the speech] for quite a long time.”