There are times when we begin to question whether our conversations online have any real-world meaning. After all, we are constantly barraged by the message that the internet isn’t real life. Despite people getting canceled because of it and the Supreme Court Ruling it is the public square of the 21st century. It is only natural to have doubts about championing free speech, but one user had a profound impact on a former Chinese censor named Liou.
Before meeting her, Liou worked as a web censor for over a decade before becoming the head of censorship at one of the significant video sharing companies. As he talked with her, he began to realize what the CCP had conditioned him to believe was wrong, and that Freedom of Speech and Democracy are values worth championing.
Since then, he has lost contact with her, but forever remembers the impact she had on his life. That impact led him to reveal in a three-part interview with China in Focus the exact nature of China’s anti free speech efforts around the world.
What he revealed in part one of the three-part interview was how there are 1-2 million private-sector web censors that private companies have to hire to meet the Chinese regime’s standards. According to Liou, they are comparable in size to official web censors dubbed the 50 Cent Army. Who are under the direct control of the CCP.
Regardless of which group you are dealing with, both openly remove content the authorities in China do not like and actively suppress any use of freedom of speech in mainland China and beyond the nation’s borders.
He describes the time he interviewed for a job at Tik Tok as akin to walking into a drug lord’s den. Everything was secretive and hidden from him. Eventually, he would learn the company has an entire department dedicated to censoring American expression of freedom of speech.
“I later realized Tik Tok was censoring American’s people’s speech there. This huge number of Chinese web-censors have been brainwashed by the CCP’s propaganda for decades and many of them are CCP members. These people living in fear of the CCP were there to censor American people’s speech.”
The Chinese are not allowed to use Tik Tok as to prevent them from coming into contact with outside ideas, notions, and facts that would challenge the CCP’s official narrative and indoctrination.
“The Chinese are not allowed to access Tic Tok. If you use a made in China cellphone or if you have a Chinese SIM card or if you are personally in China, any of these conditions will keep you out of Tik Tok.”
The Chinese must use the state-approved Douyin. As to segregate them from the global community.
These revelations come on the heels of equally damning allegations of the application data mining users’ cellphones. As some have put it to gather material, the regime can later use to blackmail people outside of China.
This was confirmed when Apple caught the application data mining users’ cellphones following the iOS 14 security update. This data harvesting wasn’t limited to the typical gather seen by Facebook and Google but is actively mining what you have in your files, clipboards, and records every 1-3 keyboard strokes.
Okay so TikTok is grabbing the contents of my clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes. iOS 14 is snitching on it with the new paste notification pic.twitter.com/OSXP43t5SZ
— Jeremy Burge (@jeremyburge) June 24, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Allowing the Chinese regime to know if you’re engaged in behaviors they can later use against you. For the average person, this is a major security threat, as it means they are recording your passwords. As for those in power, it means the Chinese are aware of affairs, money laundering, and other illicit activities anyone with the application is engaging in.
It is highly recommended if you haven’t already that you uninstall the application from any device you have it installed on. Though something tells me, those against Epic Games data mining weren’t fooled by TikTok.
