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US Representative Jamal Bowman joins TikTok creators at a news conference to speak out against a possible ban of TikTok at the House Triangle at the US Capitol in Washington on March 22. Photo: Reuters
OpinionLetters

Letters | TikTok is just another Chinese scapegoat in the US witch hunt

  • Readers discuss why concerns about data security are rich coming from the US, and Leslie Cheung coverage
US-China relations
Letters
Letters
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The popular short-video app TikTok has been made a target of the US witch hunt. TikTok, which joined the ranks of social media giants and gained about a billion monthly active users in 2021, has been downloaded over 3 billion times.

Like its competitors, TikTok has been a target of concerns about the potential misuse of the private information it gathers about its users. The main difference is its Chinese background – and the accusation, never substantiated, that it has been sharing its user data with the Chinese government. Has no software engineer conducted a thorough examination?

Amid growing tension between China and the United States, the suppression of TikTok has also been growing stronger in recent months. The US has decided to ban the app on government devices, and Canada, Britain and some other European countries have followed suit.
Back in 2020, the US administration put pressure on the parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company. This sounds as if only American ownership would somehow make the Chinese app safe for Americans to use.
One cannot help but think of Prism: Edward Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor, dropped a bombshell in 2013 when he revealed the existence of the secret surveillance programme. Run by the US government in the name of identifying potential threats to national security, Prism monitors, collects and analyses data from a variety of sources, including from phone tapping and social media.
Prism surveillance coverage is much wider than one may expect. Geographically, the programme also covers US allies. The NSA has reportedly even tapped the phones of former leaders Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Shinzo Abe. Many European leaders have expressed outrage at the programme.

US intelligence has defended Prism by citing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is “designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-US persons located outside the United States. It cannot be used to intentionally target any US citizen, any other US person, or anyone located within the United States.”

Privacy and data security are both very important issues in the internet era. But after the developments of the last few years, one cannot help speculating that TikTok, a keen competitor and a threat to US-owned social media apps in terms of market share, is just another scapegoat in the US struggle to slow down and suppress China’s peaceful rise.

Andrew Lam Siu-lo, Legislative Council member

In remembering Leslie Cheung, don’t forget young readers

I would like to voice my objection to the coverage of Leslie Cheung’s death anniversary. Yes, his achievements were admirable but the manner of his death is not.

This sends the wrong message to impressionable young readers. Suicide by a young person is never a good option; it is a foolish choice that cannot be reversed.

Harriet Tung, The Peak

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