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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Chinese social media platform TikTok on Monday filed suit against a Montana law barring the platform from operating within the state and forbidding app marketplaces from offering it for download.
“We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana. We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts,” the company wrote in a complaint filed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, per Politico.
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TikTok hasn’t exactly got Facebook dancing in the streets.
The Chinese-owned social media app is rapidly eating away at Facebook’s user base, especially among the under-30s crowd, which seems to think that Facebook is for the over-the-hill crowd.
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Republican Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a bill Wednesday that bans TikTok from the state, becoming the first one to completely outlaw the social media app.
The Montana Legislature introduced Senate Bill 419 in late February to respond to the increasing national concerns over TikTok’s ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the fear the app could be used to steal sensitive information, according to the measure. SB419, sponsored by Montana Republican state Sen. Shelley Vance, passed the Legislature in April.
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It seems TikTok just can’t quit its creeping ways.
U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08), chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, is seeking answers from the controversial video hosting site on allegations of ongoing censorship and monitoring of individuals, including those who view LGBTQ-related content on the platform.
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The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBOS) voted unanimously Wednesday to ban the popular social media app TikTok from being used by government-owned and leased devices, citing cyber security concerns as the driving reason.
“We know social media companies gather loads of personal information on users to better customize the content they serve. And we know TikTok is not alone in doing this. But there are national security and privacy concerns when TikTok’s interests interfere with the best interests of Maricopa County’s residents,” said MCBOS Member Thomas Galvin in a statement to reporters.
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Popular social media app TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance might be tracking online conversations about the COVID-19 lab leak theory, according to documents obtained by Forbes.
A ByteDance tool controlled by Chinese personnel monitors the use of “sensitive words” across company platforms, according to a Forbes investigation. Forbes accessed hundreds of ByteDance’s word lists and published them; they contain various categories including “science and medicine,” which is largely about China and the COVID-19 pandemic.
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TikTok continued to target a think tank criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Thursday after removing and then reinstating posts without any explanation.
Acton Institute, an independent think tank that advocates for individual and religious liberty, was informed Tuesday that their account had been suspended but was given no reason for the decision. After Acton filed a complaint, TikTok reinstated the account but removed two videos promoting a documentary criticizing the CCP until they were also reinstated Thursday.
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A Tennessee teacher has gone viral on Facebook after a post saying that children are not ready for social media.
Jackie Tate, whose Facebook profile identifies her as a teacher at St. Patrick’s School, a Catholic school in McEwen, Tennessee, says the following:
Imagine something embarrassing happened to you at school when you were in the 7th grade. Everyone laughed and it was awful and you were mortified. Then a few weeks passed and everyone found new things to laugh about and they moved on. You didn’t forget how embarrassed you were, but you could move on too.
Now imagine you did something embarrassing in 7th grade. And everyone laughed and it was awful. But someone also caught it on Snap Chat. And turned it into a meme. And a Tik Tok. And everyone in school saw it. And took a screen shot of it. And spread it further. And you couldn’t get away from it. And no one forgot. And you couldn’t either. And people were still re sharing it months later.
Just sit there and imagine it for a minute.
Kids aren’t ready for social media. It starts with us parents. Please share.
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An Ohio House Panel has passed the state operating budget including a $1 billion tax cut, higher income limits for school vouchers, and a ban on TikTok from government devices.
On Tuesday, the plan to spend more than $86 billion over the subsequent two fiscal years contained in the 5,300-page proposal known as House Bill (HB) 33 passed the House Finance Committee with bipartisan support.
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According to Ohio Lt. Governor Jon Husted, if lawmakers do not pass a separate bill that includes the requirement for verified parental consent prior to children’s use of social media by June 30th, lawmakers should add it back into the state budget due for Governor Mike DeWine’s signature by that date.
“The Lt. Governor’s support for the Social Media Parental Notification Act remains very strong and he will continue to advocate for its passage this spring. The budget, along with the social media provision, is currently under consideration in the Senate and we are urging members’ support there as well,” Husted spokesperson Haley Carducci told The Star.
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The Chinese Communist Party is invading America and Democrats are welcoming them in with open arms.
We see it every day now. From buying up American farmland to the Chinese spy balloon – which we now have confirmed without a shadow of a doubt was spying on our sensitive military sites – China is attempting every angle to invade our nation and that includes stealing Americans’ data.
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In a “call to arms” posted onto TikTok, a user who goes by the name “Tara” and who identifies as a “poly trans lesbian” threatened Christian conservatives and urged fellow travelers to “arm up” to fight them in a recent rant on the Chinese-owned platform.
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U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) this week reintroduced the Sister City Transparency Act, a bill aimed toward addressing geostrategic scheming, particularly by China.
“Sister cities” are municipalities that enter into diplomatic relationships with localities abroad to facilitate cultural and economic exchange. But, the senator told The Tennessee Star, China is using these arrangements to advance propaganda and exert political pressure.
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The Ohio House introduced its version of the state budget on Tuesday, including a $1 billion tax cut, higher income limits for school vouchers, and a ban on TikTok from government devices.
The second iteration of a plan to spend more than $86 billion over the subsequent two fiscal years is contained in the 5,300-page proposal known as House Bill (HB) 33.
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Montana lawmakers on Friday passed legislation to ban TikTok within the start and block downloads of the app entirely, becoming the first state in the nation to do so.
Both the federal government and numerous states have already barred the social media platform’s use on official devices, but those bans have stopped shy of outright forbidding the app on personal devices.
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About 30 states have placed restrictions on the social media app TikTok mostly related to government devices, but there is momentum for a larger ban on personal devices.
A growing number of lawmakers in the U.S. have raised national security concerns about the short-form video app because of TikTok’s ties to China through its parent company ByteDance.
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Over 200 former employees of federal surveillance agencies have since joined the corporate ranks of Big Tech companies in recent years, thus increasing the likelihood of systematic censorship of conservative accounts by such platforms.
According to the Daily Caller, the four social media companies Google, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok have recruited 248 former employees from the FBI, CIA, Department of Justice (DOJ), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as proven by searches of the professional job listing and networking platform LinkedIn. The bulk of these hires were made between 2017 and 2022, with some of the former federal employees moving on to top executive positions within the social media companies.
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Make no mistake, the “mostly peaceful” riots at the Tennessee Capitol last week under the guise of “gun safety” activism were all about power — organized and led by some well-heeled Generation Z groups with a pipeline to the Democrat-controlled White House.
Gun control extremists March For Our Lives and Gen-Z For Change hit social media to again recruit their young soldiers following the March 27 mass murders of three children and three adult staff members at The Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville. Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a deranged 28-year-old who reportedly identified as a transgender male, stormed into the private school and mercilessly shot and killed her victims before police officers fatally shot Hale.
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Two Republican Ohio House Representatives have introduced legislation that would ban TikTok from government devices.
The introduction of this legislation follows a state executive order issued by Governor Mike DeWine in January 2023, forbidding the use of TikTok or other platforms and applications held by an entity located in China from state devices citing that the Chinese Communist Party employs the apps as an “intelligence gathering mechanism.”
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Arizona State Representative Matt Gress (R-Phoenix) released a statement Thursday praising the newest Executive Order from Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) banning the social media app TikTok on state agency devices. Gress has a bill moving through the Legislature to achieve a similar result.
“I applaud the Governor for taking action to address the security and data collection threats posed by TikTok and similar apps. The Legislature still needs to act, and the Governor should sign HB 2416, a comprehensive plan to keep the state’s critical information secure and strengthen public safety. It would expand on the Governor’s order, codifying it permanently into state law, and apply to all government entities, employees, and contractors,” Gress said.
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Georgia lawmakers have sent a measure to bar TikTok and other “national security software threats” on state-owned devices.
Lawmakers in both chambers unanimously signed off on Senate Bill 93, which they say would also bar Telegram and WeChat, and sent the measure to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. It would also prohibit these applications on state devices used in the legislative and judicial branches and in the state’s K-12 schools.
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S.686, the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act or the appropriately titled “RESTRICT Act” could be used to censor any website in America, not just TikTok.
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Make no mistake about it, TikTok is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda machine living rent-free on the devices of 150 million Americans, and it’s putting our national security in jeopardy. This insidious app collects your data, surveils behavior, monitors user habits, and negatively influences our youth with an endless stream of addictive content.
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The top four downloaded applications in the past 30 days in the U.S. Apple App Store and Google Play Store are owned by Chinese-tied companies, according to data from Apptopia analyzed by Axios.
While these Chinese-tied apps are thriving in the U.S., American apps are typically not permitted to operate in China due to the country’s strict censorship, according to Axios. China has over one billion internet users according to Statista, so the U.S. is missing out on a massive market while China has exclusive access to it.
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TikTok CEO Shou Chew dodged questions Thursday about whether tactics by parent company ByteDance used to “spy” on American journalists could be used to target more Americans.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington questioned Chew on reporting by Forbes that staff at ByteDance used TikTok data last year to surveil journalists who were covering the company, gaining access to their IP addresses to track whether they had been in proximity to ByteDance employees.
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Tracking code created by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. has been discovered in 30 state government websites, Feroot Security says, according to the Wall Street Journal.
This type tracking code, or “pixel” is commonly placed by website administrators to track the results of advertising on TikTok, the outlet reported. Using data gathered in January and February, Feroot Security revealed such pixels in 30 websites maintained by 27 states, some of which have banned TikTok from their government networks and devices.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) are investigating Chinese company ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, for surveilling Americans, according to Forbes.
The DOJ Fraud Section and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia subpoenaed information from the company about its employees’ efforts to access the location and other private information of American journalists through TikTok, Forbes reported, citing an anonymous source. The FBI is conducting interviews on the same subject.
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti to the newsmaker line to discuss the amicus brief filed against Chinese-owned TikTok and the possibility of litigation that could outlaw its platform in the state.
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Forty-six attorneys general joined Tennessee in requesting that a state court force TikTok to comply with an ongoing multistate investigation into the platform’s impact on children.
Following TikTok’s failure to comply with a Request for Information (RFI) last week, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a motion Monday to require the Chinese-owned social media company to preserve documents and internal messages, his office announced. Colorado and 45 other states also filed an amicus brief Monday in support of Skrmetti’s motion, arguing that TikTok’s failure to respond impedes “the State’s ability to protect their citizens.”
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A bill to ban TikTok and WeChat on public college internet networks in Tennessee passed the Senate by a 28-1 vote Thursday.
During committee, Sen. Jon Lundberg, R-Bristol, said many in the United States have been concerned about Chinese spy balloons over the past month. But he said that, during his work in the Navy, he dealt with a lot of secrets and the biggest secret was how the military gets its secrets.
“What we have at our fingertips is thousands of balloons,” he said, pointing to his phone.
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Government agencies have less than a month to ban the popular Chinese-owned app TikTok from federal devices, according to an Office of Management and Budget memorandum issued Monday.
OMB Director Shalanda Young issued the memorandum for executive departments and agency heads about implementation guidance for banning TikTok on government-issued devices, Reuters first reported.
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The European Union Commission on Thursday suspended the use of TikTok on work devices and EU employees’ personal devices that are used for work.
“This measure aims to protect the Commission against cybersecurity threats and actions which may be exploited for cyber-attacks against the corporate environment of the Commission,” the agency said.
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TikTok’s days in the United States could be numbered under a bipartisan bill re-introduced by the heads of congress’ new Committee on China.
Reps Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL-08) on Friday submitted the legislation, which would ban the controversial video-sharing app from operating in the United States.
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State Representative Matt Gress (R-Phoenix) is introducing an amendment at the Wednesday House Governance Committee meeting dubbed the “No TikTok on Arizona Government Devices Act.”
“When I was sworn into office, I took an oath to defend my constituents and all Arizonans from enemies both foreign and domestic,” said Gress. “This legislation fulfills this promise as the security risks associated with the use of TikTok – an application owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party with the capabilities of gathering crucial details about personal, private internet activity – can’t be ignored.”
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U.S. Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI-8) this weekend expressed heightened optimism about the prospect of banning all American use of the video-sharing application TikTok after the Senate version of his bill to do so gained bipartisan support.
Last week, Senator Angus King, an independent who is a member of his chamber’s Democratic Caucus, joined Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) in cosponsoring the legislation, known as the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act). The measure has enjoyed bipartisan backing in the House of Representatives since its introduction in December, being cosponsored by Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL-8).
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