Exclusive: The Chinese government could use TikTok as a powerful and dangerous propaganda tool after installing Communist Party figures in senior positions at the social media giant’s parent company. Nick McKenzie writes.
The Chinese government could use TikTok as a powerful and dangerous propaganda tool after installing Communist Party figures in senior positions at the social media giant’s parent company.
The report claims a detailed review of corporate filings and other company material confirms that not only is TikTok owned by Chinese company ByteDance but that ByteDance is so tied to the Chinese Communist Party and government agencies that it “can no longer be accurately described as a private enterprise”. To support this claim, the report cites as an example Zhang Fuping, who is both ByteDance’s Communist Party committee secretary and its editor-in-chief.
Laws are imminent in the United States that would give the Biden administration legal authority to ban TikTok and other social media companies, with. The European Commission has banned the app from staff devices and the British government has indicated it may do likewise. The company did not answer a question about Zhang Fuping’s roles, which forms part of the Garnaut group’s challenge to TikTok’s claims of independence.
Zhang also attended a 2017 signing ceremony with a high-ranking official from the People’s Armed Police, the CCP’s domestic paramilitary force, and in 2019 announced how the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, would help to “spread the positive energy of the People’s Armed Police”. TikTok chief operating officer Vanessa Pappas told a US Senate hearing last year that there were no CCP members among the company’s American and Singaporean leadership.The parliamentary submission also attacks ByteDance’s claims it “does not produce, operate or disseminate any products or services related to surveillance”, documenting how the firm’s Chinese subsidiaries “serves Beijing’s security and repression systems in direct and explicit ways”.
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