Are you or your kids on TikTok? China hopes so.
We have reported numerous times on Big Tech’s slide into authoritarianism. We have also noted the nasty deference tech companies and corporations (and politicians) show to China over America. This includes the TikTok social media app that is one of the most popular apps on the entire planet. Its parent company, ByteDance has pledged its allegiance to “promote socialist core values.”
Now, in the latest brazen attempt to virtue signal fealty to the genocidal leaders of China and their deadly brand of authoritarianism, TikTok has chosen its new CEO from a tech firm once blacklisted by the Trump Administration. The firm, Xiaomi is famously linked to the Chinese military. It actually received an award from CCP’s for “Outstanding Builder of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” in 2019.
Shouzi Chew previously held the title of Chief Financial Officer at ByteDance – TikTok’s parent company that pledges to “promote socialist core values” – before earning the recent promotion. Prior to working for ByteDance, he served as the Chief Financial Officer of Xiaomi, a smartphone giant blacklisted over its ties to the People’s Liberation Army.
The designation was in response to the company’s involvement in the Chinese Communist Party to topple U.S. technological supremacy and its CEO [Lei Jun] receiving the “Outstanding Builder of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” award in 2019 from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
“He had also until March been a board member of Kingsoft Cloud, based out of the Chinese capital, which had one of its software applications blacklisted as a “national security” threat in January and has also been implicated in potential surveillance of China’s crackdown on its Uyghur Muslim population,” The Washington Examiner also notes.
