Supporters of the legislation claim that the app poses a national security risk because it is owned by a Chinese company, and thereby could expose sensitive U.S. data to the Chinese government.
President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign said on Wednesday that it still plans to stay on the controversial app TikTok, despite the president’s signing a foreign aid package that could eventually ban it in the United States.
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Pressure is mounting in Washington to finally pass a bill requiring TikTok’s China-based parent company to divest of the popular social media app amid new revelations that the company is much closer to the Chinese government than it has previously claimed.
Now, the House has passed a comprehensive foreign aid package which included a revised TikTok divestment bill. This makes it more likely to become law sooner rather than later as the Senate is set to consider the legislation.
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The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been secretly attempting to lobby members of Congress over recent proposals to ban the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok.
As reported by Breitbart, employees of the Chinese Embassy have been meeting with congressional staffers to try to persuade members to vote against the bill that would force the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok, or else face an indefinite ban on the app’s use in the United States. The bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in March with bipartisan support, and is now being reviewed by the Senate.
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TikTok launched a $2.1 million advertising campaign try to stop Congress from voting on a measure to effectively ban the social media app in the U.S. that will be run in states in which Senate Democrats are in tough reelection bids.
The bill, targeting the app, whose parent company is China based, overwhelmingly passed the GOP-controlled House and now awaits a vote in the Senate.
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State and local officials are working to prevent property owners from having their residences taken over by squatters as a social media influencer from Venezuela encouraged illegal immigrants to “invade” homes in the U.S.
The issue of squatting has arisen in both Florida and Georgia, states fighting against squatting, while a New York City resident was arrested for trying to prevent a squatter from reentering her home. Squatting has become a concern with the influx of illegal immigrants as a Venezuelan national encouraged others to squat in Americans’ homes.
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is calling on Senate leadership to take “immediate action” on a bill that would force ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, to divest within six months or face being banned in the U.S.
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More than 30 school districts in East Tennessee have joined a lawsuit first filed by Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (CMCSS) against social media companies, claiming that those companies are harming children.
According to WBIR, Knox, Anderson, Blount, Claiborne, Fentress, Grainger, Greene, Hamblen, Lenoir City, Loudon, Maryville, Oak Ridge, Oneida, and Sevier counties have joined the suit, which names eta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, YouTube and WhatsApp as defendants.
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“The TikTok bill gives Biden the power to ban websites & apps run by ‘a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity.’ Given that Biden routinely smears political opponents as being under the control of Putin, the danger should be obvious.”
That was entrepreneur David Sacks on X (formerly Twitter) on March 13 noting the fact that H.R. 7521, which has easily passed the House and is now on a fast track in the U.S Senate will give the President, right now it’s Joe Biden but also future presidents, can force divestiture of any website or application or else have it removed from hosting services if the President determines it is run by “a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity” including Russia, China, North Korea or Iran.
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Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expects the House-passed bill that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the U.S. might need to be amended in the Senate
Warner told reporters last week the changes could involve the timeline that it requires Bytedance to divest in the popular smartphone app.
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The CEO of a Chinese venture capital firm that quietly bought up a U.S. education company holding a Pentagon contract has long-standing connections to multiple Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence units, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
Primavera Capital, a Hong Kong-based venture capital firm, was an early investor in TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and owns Princeton Review and Tutor.com. However, a review of the firm’s Chinese-language website found that CEO and founder Fred Hu has extensive ties to the Chinese government and belonged to organizations that the U.S. government has identified as part of the CCP’s “United Front” system.
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For over a century, the Anti-Defamation League has enjoyed a reputation as the preeminent Jewish organization combating antisemitism and all forms of hate. Its acronym, ADL, has “household name” status—and not just in Jewish homes. This makes its current penchant for partisanship extraordinarily dangerous for, and beyond, the Jewish community.
Last December, Senate Republicans learned that a Joe Biden nominee for a lifetime judicial appointment, Adeel Mangi, was previously a board member and generous supporter of the antisemitic Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University Law School.
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Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary under the Trump administration, said Thursday that he is organizing a group to buy TikTok as a bill proceeds through Congress that would force the popular social media app to either be sold or be banned.
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A bill to require the Chinese company Bytedance to divest its stake in TikTok within 165 days or face a ban on the popular smartphone application in the U.S. passed on the House floor in a bipartisan vote on Wednesday.
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A GOP-led House committee has unanimously passed a bill that attempts to ban TikTok nationwide on all electronic devices.
The bill passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday and could get a final vote as early as next week, amid concerns about the China-based owner of the popular, short-form video platform giving user data to the Chinese Communist Party.
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Foreign-owned social media platforms such as TikTok could face a big change in the Sunshine State if a bill currently being advanced by the Florida Senate gets signed into law.
Senate Bill 1448 is sponsored by state Sen. Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, and would add transparency for social media platforms operating in Florida that are owned by foreign adversaries.
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As the threat of fake images and videos generated by artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially play a role in the coming 2024 elections and beyond, several tech companies have pledged to use their resources to combat misinformation as a result of such technology.
According to Politico, multiple companies are planning to cooperate through a so-called “Tech Accord” dictating several key goals and methods that will be used in the fight against false AI. The companies intend to expose and debunk any “deepfake” images or videos produced by AI, through various tactics such as watermarks and automatic detection technology.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin’s proposal to ban TikTok from offering its services to minors in Virginia was defeated on Tuesday after Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates opted against scheduling it for a vote.
The bill, HB 1468 by Delegate Jay Leftwich (R-Chesapeake), would have allowed Attorney General Jason Miyares to prohibit TikTok from knowingly allowing minors to use the social media platform in the commonwealth. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, would have been fined $7,500 per violation for every minor found to be using the site due to the company’s negligence.
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A U.S. Senator from Tennessee took to Fox News to slam Big Tech companies over the dangers their platforms pose to America’s youth.
“You know, I wish that each one of those [tech executives] would have taken their turn at apologizing to those parents,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Harris Faulkner on “The Faulkner Focus.” “You look at the amount of pornographic material on X, you look at what Snap has done, connecting kids to pedophiles and drug dealers, TikTok, with the kids that have done these TikTok challenges and lost their lives, Discord which is used for chats and gaming, and kids are meeting really bad actors. Every one of them owed those parents that were in that room an apology and those kids – friends of kids – who had lost their lives that showed up wearing those t-shirts. Some were worth more than $230 which is what [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg said a teen was worth to them on social media.”
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In the dynamic landscape of global entertainment, the influence of Beijing over Hollywood has long been a topic of heated discussion. While the box office power of the Chinese market has waned, giving a breath of creative freedom back to our filmmakers, there looms a new and more pervasive form of influence on Hollywood and well beyond: TikTok.
Beijing may have lost theatrical market leverage, but it has more than made up for that with an overpowering social media presence that has become an epidemic, not just in Hollywood but throughout the United States. In fact, the Chairman of Congress’s Select Committee on China, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), accurately labels TikTok as “digital fentanyl” and has been aggressively campaigning to ban the social media app.
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Two bills put forward by Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates were defeated in the a subcommittee by Democrats on Monday, just months after Governor Glenn Youngkin said promised to file bills targeting social media companies, particularly TikTok, to protect children in the commonwealth.
Defeated by a margin of two votes, HB 1161 would have required social media platforms to obtain a verifiable form of parental consent for minors to use the platform and for parental consent to be obtained a second time before social media companies could collect personal data from minors.
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn addressed the CEOs of five social media companies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis” on Wednesday.
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TikTok continues to distribute data to its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance despite its purported efforts to protect American data, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
TikTok attempted to address concerns from lawmakers and public officials over its handling of Americans’ data by spending $1.5 billion on establishing an isolated unit to safeguard American data called Project Texas. However, managers within TikTok are telling employees to share data to ByteDance, bypassing authorized channels, according to current and previous employees as well as company records the WSJ saw.
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A bill introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly would require minors to have parental consent before downloading social media applications.
HB 1891, filed by State Rep. William Lamberth (R-Portland) is called the “Protecting Children from Social Media Act.”
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) released a statement on Wednesday slamming a new report detailing the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok’s interest in permanently moving its Nashville operations into a new office building in Music Row.
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Turkish smugglers appear to be using social media platforms to help migrants from across the globe enter the U.S. illegally through the southern border, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of Telegram and TikTok posts.
The advertisements offer arrangements for travel, visas and transportation directly to the U.S.-Mexico border for migrants in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Border Patrol encounters of migrants crossing the southern border illegally have hit numerous records in recent years, with more than 2.2 million encounters in fiscal year 2022 and more than 2 million in fiscal year 2023, according to federal data.
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The Iowa high schooler who on Thursday fatally shot a student and wounded five others before taking his own life reportedly posted a video of TikTok before carrying out the killings with the message “now we wait.”
The shooter, 17-year-old Dylan Butler, appeared to have posted the video from a school bathroom.
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TikTok might be popular among America’s youth, but a majority of voters view it as a threat to the United States. An even higher percentage favor a federal ban of the social media platform.
RMG Research, a polling firm led by Scott Rasmussen, shared its latest survey data exclusively with The Daily Signal. The poll was conducted Dec. 18-19 among 1,000 registered U.S. voters.
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The popular video app TikTok seems to be promoting content to align with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) goals, a Thursday study found.
Hashtag data showed that content sensitive to the CCP is far less popular on TikTok than on its rival, Instagram, accordingto the study by Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University. A comparison between Instagram and TikTok showed that the number of posts about non-sensitive hashtags in the realm of politics and pop-culture was fairly similar based on how many users each platform has, but the number of posts on hashtags for topics sensitive to the CCP was substantially higher on Instagram than on TikTok.
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The Social Media Parental Notification Act, signed into law by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine earlier this year, is set to take effect next month in the Buckeye State.
The bill was passed as part of DeWine’s 2023-24 executive budget presented to the Ohio General Assembly.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) said in a Friday news conference that he will introduce legislation to the Virginia General Assembly to ban TikTok for minors, restrict other social media from gathering data about children, and expand state-funded mental health initiatives in public schools and colleges.
Youngkin revealed four new legislative efforts he intends to champion during the upcoming legislative session, after first calling for an additional $500 million to address youth mental health in a Friday press release.
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A new study from Pew Research Center reveals that 1 in 5 American teenagers are on social media websites “almost constantly.”
As reported by Axios, the Pew survey, an online poll with a sample size of 1,453 kids in the 13-17 age range, recorded a significant rise in social media use among that particular age group compared to a previous survey in 2014 and 2015.
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A federal judge in Montana has blocked an upcoming state-wide ban on using the social media app TikTok, calling it unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy said Thursday the ban on the app, whose ownership has ties to Communist-led China, “oversteps state power and infringes on the Constitutional right of users and businesses.”
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Has the TikTok Left just jumped the shark?
Well, yes. Imagine seizing on Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” as a revelation to justify your wounded adolescent narcissism and historical ignorance? This past week, a bunch of videos from the Chinese owned data-hoovering and propaganda-peddling app took the meme-world by storm by showering some love on the defunct Islamic terrorist and kicking America in the process. Quoth one fragile female as she brushed her teeth: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” Another client of this new experiment in juvenile mind control bleated that the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks taught her that America was a “plague on the entire world.”
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Videos showing people reading Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter justifying the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon went viral Wednesday evening, prompting a media outlet to delete its translation of the document.
The Guardian deleted the letter Wednesday after it had been active on the site since being published on Nov. 24, 2002, directing readers to an article from that date about the letter. Videos on the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok showed users reading the letter, Rolling Stone reported.
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TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance’s personnel can allegedly view the private connections of a vast array of politicians, Forbes reported on Wednesday.
TikTok has a social graph tool that reveals connections of individuals including members of President Joe Biden’s family, governors, senators and state attorneys general, Forbes reported. Other social media companies have access to similar data but TikTok has fewer barriers for employees to view it and more personal information available for them to draw from, according to individuals who have worked for multiple tech firms who spoke to Forbes.
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In a second GOP presidential debate that often seemed more like a disorderly reality TV show, the Babylon Bee’s satirical news headline may have best captured the mood of viewers: ‘Mute Button’ Wins GOP Debate.
The seven Republican candidates on stage at Wednesday evening’s gladiator match in Simi Valley’s Ronald Reagan Presidential Library shouted and talked over each other and slung more mud than an Iowa hog farm.
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Some employees at the popular social media platform TikTok are concerned about the influence the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has on the company as executives from its parent, ByteDance, take on new positions, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A number of high-level executives from ByteDance in China have taken on new roles at TikTok’s U.S. operation, with employees complaining internally that there may be greater CCP influence than what is being publicly disclosed, according to the WSJ. The China-based ByteDance is subject to CCP regulation and can be pressured by the government to hand over information that the company has collected, which has in the past raised concerns over whether American users of the app are having their data collected by the foreign government.
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Long time national political reporter Neil W. McCabe connects the strategic dots he sees the candidates following into the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee tonight on Wednesday’s episode of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a motion to compel the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to comply with an earlier court order requiring it to produce relevant evidence in response to a multi-state investigation.
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Elon Musk said Monday that the Anti-Defamation League pushed X, social media platform formally known as Twitter, to shut down the popular Libs of TikTok account.
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Meta recently took “what appears to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world,” off its platforms, according to the company’s quarterly Adversarial Threat Report released this week.’
The social media accounts that made up the covert influence operation — collectively dubbed “Spamouflage” — were active all over the world, including in America, major U.S. allies, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora.
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The City of Phoenix and Phoenix Police Department released crime statistics for the first six months of 2023, revealing that overall crime is down 2 percent, even as auto thefts, rape, and police shootings rise in the city.
Numbers released by the city show violent crime is down 2 percent in Arizona’s capital, and property crimes are down 19 percent, when the first six months of 2023 are compared with the same period in 2022. Still, the city reported an increase in rapes, increase in auto thefts, and officer-involved shootings.
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On Thursday, the Nashville-based Beacon Center of Tennessee published results of its first-ever poll revealing how Tennessee voters feel about a variety of issues.
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ByteDance, the CCP-linked parent company of popular shortform video platform TikTok, is trying to enter the book publishing industry, The New York Times reported Saturday.
The company filed in late April for a U.S. trademark for a publishing firm, 8th Note Press, and has already begun reaching out to some independent authors for the rights to sell their books, the NYT reported. TikTok has helped some books become bestsellers in the past several years, posts using the #Booktok hashtag have been viewed more than 91 billion times and the combined sales of 100 authors with large BookTok followings eclipsed $760 million in 2022, a 60% surge from the year prior.
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A new report reveals that the youngest generations of today are more likely to trust news they receive from social media influencers rather than from actual news outlets and reporters.
As Fox News reports, the study was conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism out of the University of Oxford. The survey found that 55 percent of TikTok users get their news from “personalities” on the platform, with another 52 percent of respondents saying the same thing for Instagram influencers.
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A student at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio is calling for action after a professor failed her on her final project proposal over her use of the term “biological women” in a paper about feminism.
Olivia Krolczyk claimed in a now-viral TikTok video that her Women’s Gender Studies in Pop Culture professor failed her on her project proposal even though it was “a solid proposal” because using the term biological women is “exclusionary.”
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It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files — the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship — was first published. Twitter Files One, perhaps the mildest of more than 20 unique reports, details the social media company’s internal deliberations in the days before the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was removed from the site. Later reports have exposed the tendrils of a governmental apparatus that influenced some of the most significant media distortions in recent American history, from the fraudulent Hamilton 68 misinformation tracking dashboard to the FBI’s intimate involvement with Twitter’s content-moderation practices.
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Middle school students in northern Virginia have created “fight clubs” with the assistance of parents, and the violence is entering the school building, the school’ principal says.
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Popular social media platform TikTok, which is owned by China-based ByteDance, is testing a new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that could soon roll out in the United States.
The bot, named “Tako,” can chat with TikTok users about short videos and assist them in finding content by taking into account their interests and preferences, Daniel Buchuk, an analyst for app intelligence firm Watchful, told Bloomberg. TikTok has attracted scrutiny from lawmakers as the platform’s parent company ByteDance is based in China and has ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while the company has reportedly violated privacy and censored conversations, prompting lawmakers to pursue restrictions.
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According to multiple Thursday reports, the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (CMCSs) is filing a lawsuit against several Silicon Valley titans of industry, claiming that social media is having a debilitating effect on its students.
The Frantz Law Group of California, working with the Tennessee law firm Lewis Thomason, filed the lawsuit the week of May 8, according to ClarksvilleNow.com. The defendants in the suit include Facebook, Google, Instagram, Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp and YouTube.
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