Okay so now to the actual content. The actual argument they were using. I’ll kinda alternate between Congress and Chew kind of. Again, I’m not naming anyone (I don’t remember them) but I do remember some quotes so I won’t put any that are completely inaccurate. Luckily, they all seemed to share ten braincells so it won’t be like I’m reciting 5 hours of information here. There was like maybe 12 relevant unique points they had. Literally in a room of like 30-40 people, maybe 12. I mean its not their fault but again it would be less retarded to collaborate on all their questions (since it was a bipartisan front anyways) so they don’t repeat and they could even be more informative about the whole meeting. It won’t be in chronological order, just order of relevance I guess.
Now one last point that doesn’t matter actually, there was only like maybe 4 dozen Congress people. Don’t know, didn’t try to count. Thing is, they definitely didn’t represent every jurisdiction which is what I assumed at first. But then there were like 5 people from my home state of Florida so. I don’t know, what was the process of choosing these reps and do they have these questions or did they get committees? Orlando didn’t get a committee to bring questions forward I think. I just don’t know why they are doing this, even publicly, if its not the questions of actual civilians who use the app. Or parents of people who do. Again, Tik Tok has a pretty positive reputation. Look at what people say about toxic Twitter or “ew, Redditor”. We as a united Internet community recognize Facebook as a hellhole but Tik Tok is getting this treatment despite every online person saying either “eh it just kids” or “yeah its really funny” or “its better than Vine” or “its worse than Vine but it fine”. A whole five hours of this (and that’s just this hearing) seems like a bit of an overreaction over xenophobic headcanons, @Congress.
“Connections to China” was one of the main points each and every Congress member referenced in some way. Early on, Mr Chew actually clarified that Tik Tok was based in Singapore and Culver City, LA, California. If you don’t know, Singapore is actually an independent city state basically halfway between China and Australia while Culver City is a decent part of the Angels. They repeatedly ask him from start to finish about the parent company ByteDance since it is Chinese but he alludes that ByteDance is also probably international, “it works with many companies in China but-” *interrupted*. Even with ByteDance being the parent, he doesn’t see that it impacts his work at Tik Tok. Whenever they ask for more details about ByteDance, he reminds them that he can’t speak for them because oh right, he doesn’t fucking work there. He works in Singapore for Tik Tok, one of the hardest things for them to understand.
So then lets bring it back to how Tik Tok is directly connected to China. Again early on, Chew establishes that out of the handful of board members the company has, the majority are American. I think exactly one was Chinese. Ignoring this four the next four hours, they try to close in on the technology partners Tik Tok has are Chinese but rest assured, “others in our industry use Chinese resources” according to Chew. Um, that wasn’t verbatim but I agree with him nonetheless. We all fucking use China as a business resource, of course other social medias do as well. But they would cut him off before he could complete the sentence and then act like it doesn’t convince them. Okay so maybe even if Tik Tok is international, it’s investors are American, and its collaborators are just as Chinese as those for other platforms, maybe the actual problem is that the Chinese workers in employment are apart of the Communist party. Now one of them came up with a fair argument considering that China is single party, “well if they are Chinese, then you’d be able to suggest that they are Communist, yes or no?” Chew would answer, “I do not know the political affiliations of my employees” and one time added, “it doesn’t come up- we just don’t ask that at all”. Now I understand, if Tik Tok did have Chinese workers, they probably are communist but, in the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. Especially when I think they have only one office in China. (Also China isn’t Marxist or even Soviet or even purely Maoist anymore. It has regular capitalist business like ByteDance). All those workers have to do is clock in, write some code, and clock out. There’s no…there’s no scheme why would they care? It’s an app where zoomer witches decided to use the moon to cast a curse that one time in 2021. Also, if they just want Chew to assume they’re communist then this isn’t a productive question, this is just trying to further damn the extremely biased atmosphere against Chew (within the room). So he doesn’t know if his workers are communist, but does he know that China owns the company?
Yup that was their trump card. “And by using these two monsters, I can xyz summon ‘Tik Tok is a State Owned Company!”
“With respect Congressperson, that activates my trap card, ‘Tik Tok is a Private Company’!”
“Well I find that hard to believe” then the guy who says this literally just shifts the conversation. Didn’t even bring up why he is in disbelief, he just assumes there isn’t a private company in China. We’re in 2023 and he still thinks China kept the fully communist model (the reason from my understanding is that Soviet Russia and Maoist China cannot persist in a capitalist world. Communism must involve the entire globe).
Chew actually tries to clear this up in the first hour as well but it kept coming back. He said Tik Tok is private and also owned by Chinese-foreign investors. But way late like 2 hours later someone once again regaled how “well China has this stipulation in their legislation that a company can’t move out without permission”. One guy, a southerner I think, “Well I don’t know what your people told you but it seems you are unaware that China does indeed own you”. I…the logic fails me. I don’t even think Chew got to respond to this specific accusation but other times he basically argued, “China can’t stop us and we are still private and Globally owned”.
But just ignore that one, Congress. Guess what, China absolutely has technology to use the camera on the app to spy on American users, access GSP information with the app, and the potential to use home wifi to connect to other devices in the home! For something! Yes, these were all abridged versions of at least three techno-conspiracies they had since they concluded China and Tik Tok collaborate. And it didn’t just come from one dumbass person but several different people a few different times. I will say, if China could do all three of these, we already lost the race. Like imagine how much other hardware and software we buy from them that they could be spying with! By the way, GSP is not a typo, there was just someone’s great grandma who kept tripping over the term GPS.
“We don’t use the camera to do any body tracking. We only need to- the user to show their eyes for certain face filters to work and that information is deleted after use. We don’t collect or keep and body information”.
“We have no location tracking and there’s a setting for users to turn it off like other apps.” Another time, “we do no GPS tracking at all”. There was a third person who brought up how China could track troop movements and they also randomly stated in their turn that “the Army should probably be the ones to remove Tik Tok from their phone but the issue is still Chinese spying”. Bro I’ve seen some army toks, China doesn’t need to be secretly spying on them with how they film themselves.
Oh and you’ve seen the clip for the last one. I will say, the air in the room for this congressman’s argument about the wifi was completely against him. I think it was one out of his three questions but no one in the room was looking to support him. He was the only one to embarrass himself so disastrously. Even the elderly lady saying GSP actually understood the tech.
I also say, this Congress clarified to me that the European gov employees had to remove tik tok from their phone. Chew agrees that “actually all government employees should be totally off social media” lmao. The person who brought it up didn’t even seem to agree with that sentiment.
“Next I play, ‘Connect the Dots’. This allows me to choose a card in your hand related to the card in your field and send both cards to the graveyard!” I think in the second hour, someone asked about the team Chew prepared with for that day and if he got any advice from China. Well his training partners were American and “I received many well wishes from many people all over” in order to not claim China. I’m fine with this strategy from him but they hated the vagueness of this answer and asked him several times. The Florida Kayleigh asked more directly, “have you been asked to downplay genocide by the Chinese government?!” when they were on the Uyghur topic. Someone else pointed out that since there’s a Chinese board member, they are communist. Another said that since ByteDance has a Chinese founder, that they are communist so the company is communist controlled and that they could advise Chew on how to defend himself that day. He rejected all of this reminding him that he doesn’t know their affiliations and to be honest, it would be really stupid for him to just assume it on live just for Congress’ peace. Like they’d just fire him whether or not they were communist. There was also a tiny controversy that lasted an hour over the single stock that the Chinese government owns of ByteDance. According to Chew, they don’t do anything with it because ByteDance is just entertainment. The stock is just to fund to government.
Now the first card Chew played on his first turn was “Project Texas”. It was a continuous spell card that halved the damage he took during any damage calculation. Project Texas was a transition of server information for Tik Tok from completely out of China and into the US. I guess to Texas but anyways, this transition was taking place over a while now, with several millions and billions funding it, all to have an American third party, Oracle, host the sites information on non-Chinese soil. It was to be secure and everything but this was a point of contention or actually confusion for every Congress member. Again, he explained the details of it in his opening, stuff I completely understood, but because they still had their retarded theories, they had soooo many questions about it. And it’s not like its new info to them, this has been a long process. They should know about it now. For Chew, convincing them about Project Texas would be the knife needed to completely sever Chinese-Tik Tok conspiracies.
One thing they were confused about was the original Tik Tok server still in China. They thought that since ByteDance was the partner, and CHINESE, that China could scrub the OG server at their whim. Well we know just from Wikipedia that Douyin and Tik Tok have different servers. Who the fuck puts two different apps on the same server if they can’t/don’t interact? Much less all of the other internet stuff ByteDance owns. But he didn’t even argue that angle, he said, “access to our server is on as needs basis with all nations…we never shared with China…they never asked us so no…we do not give any data to the Chinese government”. Despite the many answers, even the very last member would ask about this subject. But before him, there were three (all male) members that hyped themselves as techno-wizards and spoke in jargon that just didn’t correlate with Chew which was funny to me. Like Chew would just talk normally while they tried to use terms they don’t remember the definition of since university. One guy in particular, looked really nerdy he would’ve been shoved in the locked back in 1978, had a FIVE minute speech about some specific US/Chinese law article (I don’t even remember) and then when Chew tried to answer, he kept stopping him to say, “but let’s keep it mile 30 thousand”. What the fuck does that mean? And Chew would say half a sentence before he says, “mile 30 thousand”. What? Hilariously, Chew was also just flabbergasted, he wasn’t even at 9 thousand yet. I couldn’t- whatever.
Some tried asking about the timeline or cost of the Project, which are good questions, but Chew didn’t really have much to say as he doesn’t want to just promise it. From my understanding, the process is like almost complete. Like 80% although Chew says “by the end of this year”. Unfortunately, despite their questions, everyone acted like China still had tempered with the servers before Texas despite that being against policy and evidence. One even brought up how actually its in China’s constitution that they can access whatever server in their country but again, “they have not asked us for access” so it doesn’t look like China fucking cares. “Well that’s not believable, for no reason”, they replied being the worst fucking conversationalist ever.
Another point of the Project was that it would be a functional firewall stopping China from ever accessing it especially since the new server would be in America. Now someone decided to find a loophole because Chew admitted that ByteDance and Tik Tok share lawyers (duh its a corp). The loophole was that since the lawyers work for both Chinese ByteDance and international Tik Tok, that there is no firewall. Those lawyers could still bring info…wait what? The lawyers? Are gonna access the Texan servers hosted by Oracle (a third party) and take American data to China? What? That’s not a hole in the firewall, that’s just a crime, steal dating. The fuck? And Chew basically said “so you’re insinuating there could be a hacker, well that can be dealt with” like of course. What was bro cooking?
tdwriter 