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Comment by seanvelasco

THANK YOU!

you articulated it perfectly

the issue is not that tiktok harvests user data, not free speech, not that China is refuses to let US counterparts operate in China - the issue is, TikTok is an insidious propaganda machine that influences our your people, and entire generation, to abandon their values and replace them with views favorable to the CCP

daily, hourly, and each minute young people interact with TikTok, they're influenced by a foreign adversary.

it's telling them Ukraine is the actual aggressor, that Putin is "based", that China is a paradise, that the West is falling, that China has a valid claim on all the maritime disputes, among other things that are non-truths

i owe the rise of antisemitism among young people to TikTok. young people who otherwise do not hold a negative opinion towards Israel suddenly became anti-Israel and hold hatred towards Jews

i have experienced the above first-hand. my account doesn't interact with any current affairs, yet I am bombarded with anti-Israel narratives. there are thousands - yes, thousands - of antisemitic comments and replies under each video. and young people read them and think it's normal - that it's normal to think this way and say such things at loud

i reported hundreds of such comments. all my reports, according to TikTok, did not violate their "community standards". instead, my replies to those comments were removed for violating their "community standards"

(to the people who'll say it's not true, i have data to back it up, and i can send a link to a huggingface repo that contains the dataset)

it is clear pro-CCP and CCP-aligned views are promoted while others are supressed.

i live in a country with tensions with China, and my TikTok FYP page is flooded with pro-CCP narratives and narratives that suggest my country is weak and hopeless

TikTok is a national security issue. it's not enough the TikTok divests from China. it must be banned for the sake of the next century.

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