Tag: TikTok

Commentary: Trump Made TikTok Great Again

Daily Caller News Foundation

In today’s digital era, where social media platforms serve as the battlegrounds for ideas, information and cultural exchange, the conversation around banning TikTok must be approached with caution and a deep understanding of its implications.

With over 170 million American users, TikTok has transcended mere entertainment to become a vital tool for communication, creativity and, notably in the 2024 presidential election, political engagement. President-elect Donald Trump’s strategic embrace of this platform, known for its cultural influence among the younger demographic, was instrumental in clinching his win.

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Judges Rule Against TikTok Citing ‘Grave Threat to National Security’

Daily Caller News Foundation
iPhone with TikTok app logo

A federal appeals court ruled Friday to uphold a law that will force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the platform or have it banned in the U.S.

A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled unanimously that the law forcing ByteDance, TikTok’s parent firm, to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company or face a U.S. ban is legal, clearing the way for the law to take effect on Jan. 19, 2025. In their ruling, the judges characterized TikTok as a national security risk because the Chinese government is able to manipulate the app to its advantage and stated that the April divest-or-ban law does not run afoul of the First Amendment, as some of the law’s critics have contended.

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TikTok Bans Pro-Life Students for Life Same Day It Begged Court to Overturn Its Pending U.S. Ban

Just the News

Students for Life of America said TikTok banned the pro-life group Monday night, hours after the Chinese-owned platform begged a federal appeals court to overturn a law that forces ByteDance to sell the company or face a U.S. ban.

“Couldn’t find this account,” is all SFLA’s TikTok page says as of 10:30 p.m. Monday. The last archive Just the News could find is Aug. 22, which said the page had 94,000 followers.

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TikTok May Be Held Liable for Girl’s Death, Upending Three Decades of Tech Immunity

Just the News
Montana TikTok Ruling

The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet” may not be as powerful as believed by the bipartisan chorus demanding reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

TikTok’s biggest immediate problem now may be its own users, their parents, and state attorneys general, rather than the state and federal lawmakers seeking to ban the Chinese-owned company and force ByteDance to sell it to an American entity, following a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling Aug. 27 that denies TikTok legal immunity for an algorithm choice.

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Big Tech Liable for Breaking Promises to Users that Led to Suicide, Death Threats: Appeals Court

Just the News
Smart Phone Filled with Apps

Days before the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent Big Tech lawyers scrambling by upending three decades of judicial precedents on Section 230 immunity from liability, its West Coast counterpart warned platforms their immunity had limits, too.

While far smaller in scope than the 3rd Circuit’s ruling that TikTok could be held liable for a little girl’s death by algorithmically recommending the video she fatally copied, likely to provoke Supreme Court intervention, the 9th Circuit ruling Aug. 22 against third-party Snapchat app developer Yolo also suggests judges are growing skeptical of maximalist views of the 1996 law.

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Study Finds TikTok Manipulates Content to Favorably Promote Chinese Government

Just the News
TikTok

TikTok uses an algorithm to promote content that puts the Chinese government in a favorable light in order to sway users’ views, according to a new study from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).

The study builds off a previous report from December that found the social media site likely promotes pro-China content, as the app faces bipartisan criticism over national security concerns. The app is already facing a potential ban in the United States if the Chinese parent company ByteDance doesn’t divest its shares of the platform on time.

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Bipartisan Bill Introduced to Better Monitor Terror Threats on Foreign Mobile Apps Like TikTok

Just the News
Rep. August Pfluger and Rep. Jimmy Panetta (composite image)

Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence, and Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., introduced a bill to “conduct annual assessments on terrorism threats to the United States posed by terrorist organizations utilizing foreign cloud-based mobile or desktop messaging applications, and for other purposes.”

Pfluger said that cloud-based technology has given “terrorist groups even more tools to use in their pursuit of deadly chaos” more than 20 years since the 9/11 attacks.

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Miyares Joins 20 Other AGs in Support of Federal TikTok Ban

The Center Square
Jason Miyares

Republican attorneys general from 21 states, led by the attorneys general of Montana and Virginia, submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia defending the federal law banning TikTok in the U.S.

President Joe Biden signed the legislation into law in April due to concerns that through Chinese-owned parent company Bytedance, the Chinese Communist Party might be able to gain access to users’ private data or influence American youth toward communism. The law threatens to prohibit the app in the U.S. if Bytedance does not sell its shares in the social media company by Jan. 19, 2025.

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Justice Department Says TikTok Has Collected User Data on Issues Such as Gun Control and Abortion

Just the News

The Justice Department on Friday evening accused the social media app TikTok of gathering information on users’ opinions on social issues such as abortion and gun control.

Attorneys for the DOJ said in documents filed at an appeals court in Washington that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance used an internal web-suite system called Lark to get TikTok employees to communicate with ByteDance engineers in China.

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Commentary: TikTok and Instagram Turned Me into a Leftist, but X Helped Me Escape

Virginia Star Staff
Black Lives Matter Rally

Social media plays a significant role in shaping the opinions of those 35 and under — it’s the primary news source for most in that age group, one survey found.

Some stats report that daily screen time for 16- to 24-year-olds is nearly eight hours among females and seven hours among males. To put that in perspective — that’s equivalent to the average time in a school day.

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Commentary: Big Tech Wants to Crush Your Entire World and Trap You in Virtual Hell

Virginia Star Staff
Woman wearing Apple Vision Pro goggles

Apple’s recent ad for a new, thinner iPad featured a hydraulic press smashing everything the new gadget could supposedly replace: paints, musical instruments, a clay bust, arcade cabinets, record players, books.

The new iPad promises a future in which humanity has forgotten the whisper of the brush over the canvas, the vibration of a guitar string, the joy of finding a note tucked into an old used book, and the easy camaraderie of children cheering each other on as they take turns at a challenging arcade game. The craftsmanship that went into these objects is now obsolete. You don’t have to go anywhere, touch anything.

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TikTok Sues U.S. Government over New Law Banning App

Virginia Star Staff
TikTok User

On Tuesday, the Chinese social media app TikTok and its parent company filed a lawsuit against the federal government of the United States over a new law threatening to ban the app if it is not sold to another company by next year.

ABC News reports that the lawsuit, filed by TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, claims the new law is a violation of the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s users. The bill was signed into law by Joe Biden last month, with the TikTok ban being one provision of a larger $95 billion foreign aid package. The law requires ByteDance to sell TikTok within 9 months, or else the app will be banned from use in the United States.

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Biden Campaign Says It Will Stay on TikTok Despite Foreign Aid Package That Could Ban It

Just the News
President Biden in front of TikTok logo (composite image)

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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Fresh Revelations About TikTok Come as Senate Considers the Divestment Bill

Just the News
TikTok app in front of Chinese flag

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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China Lobbying Congress amid TikTok Ban Efforts

Virginia Star Staff
iPhone with TikTok app logo

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 Launches Ad Campaign in Battleground States in Which Vulnerable Dem Senators Seek Reelection

Just the News
Tiktok

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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States Focus on Squatting as TikToker Encourages Illegal Immigrants to ‘Invade’ Homes

Just the News
Illegal immigrant being arrested

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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Commentary: If H.R. 7521 Was Only About TikTok, the Bill Would Only Apply to TikTok

Virginia Star Staff
TikTok Social Media

“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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Senate Intel Chair: ‘There May Need to be Certain Changes Made’ to House-Passed TikTok Bill

Just the News
Senator Mark Warner

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 Pentagon is Paying a Chinese Communist Party-Linked Venture Capital Firm for Tutoring Services

Virginia Star Staff
Chinese Students

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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Commentary: ADL’s Partisanship Harms the Fight Against Antisemitism

Virginia Star Staff
Jon Greenblatt

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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GOP-Led House Passes Bipartisan Bill to Force China Company Bytedance to Divest Stake in TikTok

Just the News

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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House Panel Unanimously Passes Bill to Ban TikTok in U.S., Final Vote as Early as Next Week

Just the News
TikTok China

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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Tech Companies Plan to Combat Use of Fake AI in Elections

Virginia Star Staff
Facebook User

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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Gov. Youngkin’s Plan to Ban TikTok for Minors Dies Without Vote in House of Delegates

Tom Pappert
Tiktok Phone

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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Commentary: Ban TikTok or Let Beijing Control Our Broadcast Networks, Too

RealClearWire
Tiktok User

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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Virginia Democrats Shut Down Social Media Regulations After Gov. Youngkin Promised Bills to Protect Commonwealth Kids

Tom Pappert
Kids Phone

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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TikTok is Still Sending American User Data to Chinese Parent Company: Report

Virginia Star Staff

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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Turkish Smugglers Use Social Media to Help ‘Citizens of Every Country’ Reach the U.S. Border

Virginia Star Staff
Illegal Immigrants

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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TikTok Data Reveals Content Favors CCP Goals, According to New Study

Virginia Star Staff
TikTok China

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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YoungkinWatch: Governor Promises Bills Banning TikTok for Minors, Restricting Social Media Data Gathering for Kids

Tom Pappert
Gov. Glenn Youngkin

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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Pew Research: Many Teens Use Social Media ‘Almost Constantly’

Virginia Star Staff

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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Federal Judge Blocks Montana’s TikTok Ban

Just the News
Montana TikTok Ruling

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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Commentary: Flirtation with Evil Will Not End Well for the Progressive Left

Virginia Star Staff

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 of People Sympathizing with Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ Go Viral

Virginia Star Staff

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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CCP-Linked TikTok’s Personnel Can Allegedly Access Politicians’ Private Networks: Report

Virginia Star Staff

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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Second GOP Presidential Debate Turns Into a Rhetorical Brawl as Candidates Jockey for Position in Trump-Dominated Race

M.D. Kittle

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.

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TikTok Employees Raise Concern over CCP Influence as China Execs Move In

Virginia Star Staff

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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Meta’s Epidemic of Chinese ‘Spamouflage’ Propaganda

Virginia Star Staff

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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TikTok’s CCP-Linked Parent Company Is Trying to Break into a Whole New Industry

Admin

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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Today’s Youth List TikTok, Instagram Influencers as Most Trusted Sources of News

Virginia Star Staff

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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Commentary: Combating the Censorship Industrial Complex

RealClearWire

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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TikTok Sues Montana over Total Statewide Ban

Just the News

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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Montana Becomes the First State to Completely Ban TikTok

Virginia Star Staff

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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TikTok’s Parent Company Allegedly Tracks Conversations About COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory: Report

Virginia Star Staff

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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