In all seriousness, TikTok's Gen-Z userbase played a big role in a huge embarrassment for Trump recently, and given that there seems no end to his personal vanity and vindictiveness, I would not be surprised if this decision was rooted at least in part in vengeance against its users.
Why would any candidate seek "vengeance" in an election year toward a cohort who will be voting for the first time (in many cases) in 2020 and who seem overall more conservative than the previous generation? It seems way more likely to me that the jester is cover for or distraction from something much more serious, and I'd rather talk about that than feed the jester's personal vanity by interpreting every major world event through orange-colored glasses :)
There has been literally zero proof about that as far as i know. If you do have some compelling evidence apart from “the x community knows this”, please share them.
The issues risen in the “famous” whitepaper about TikTok’s alleged “security issues” were just pretty much standard fingerprinting that almost all apps do nowadays, like it or not.
If people are going to allege something, I seriously would like to have proof.
I’m not defending China in here, but this is not a good direction to go if we have a large number of people speculating and alleging something without a solid proof. Not that it’s anything new.
"Article 7
Any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep the secrets of the national intelligence work known to the public.
The State protects individuals and organizations that support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work."
https://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1800/sources/2017_PRC_Natio....
"Article 7 Any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep the secrets of the national intelligence work known to the public. The State protects individuals and organizations that support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work."
I 100% believe this, and it seems odd that anyone wouldn't suspect that by default, in the same way one should expect DARPA strings still attached to DARPA's Silicon Valley corporate-children.
I'd like to see some evidence before describing that as anything more than a gut suspicion, though, and definitely not "public knowledge". This type of Executive reaction reads more like a response to a targeted threat and not just the general background noise of "all your base are belong to China" like over the past few years.
