Caroleene Dobson, a Montgomery real estate attorney and Republican candidate for Alabama’s Second Congressional District seat, said she will join the growing number of conservatives in Washington who are sponsoring legislation to curb the runaway control of social media by the Chinese government and extremist liberal interests.
TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., has supercharged its popularity, particularly among young Americans. But its growth has raised generational, bipartisan concern over the misuse of user data and the app’s susceptibility to Chinese government influence, among a sea of red flags pertaining to the impact of toxic content available.
“As relations between China and the U.S. continue to erode and every expert agrees that cyber warfare is a real and looming threat, more than 150 million Americans have willingly surrendered their personal information to the Chinese-owned TikTok video app,” Dobson said.
“At the same time, those who express opinions contrary to woke ideas and liberal dogma on their social media pages are routinely sent to ‘Facebook jail’ or have their accounts permanently revoked like President Trump.”
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TikTok is under fire for propagating to liberal viewpoints at the expense of conservative creators. “Shadow-banned” is slang for removing content from access through algorithms, while sending no indication to the creator their content is being blocked. Dobson said this is comparable to power wielded by third-world dictators.
“When social media owners can silence a president and shadow ban all conservative thought with which they disagree, they assume the powers of Third World, Banana Republic dictators,” Dobson says.
“And when the Chinese Communist Party can access the personal information of millions of Americans at any time they wish, we are allowing them to weaponize the internet and placing their fingers upon the trigger.”
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Dobson also pointed to an internal company post by a senior Facebook engineer as evidence of the almost universal liberal domination of the popular social media.
The post, which was reported by the New York Times, read: “We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views. We claim to welcome all perspectives but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
Grayson Everett is the state and political editor for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @Grayson270
