F-22Raptor
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“Without any solid evidence,” a Chinese government spokesperson complained last week, “some people in the U.S. have been abusing the concept of national security to suppress non-American enterprises. These U.S. moves are utterly disgraceful.” You can use Google to find those comments on the ongoing TikTok pantomime if you like—they’re online. Obviously you can’t use Google if you’re in China, though, because Google is banned—alongside Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Yet again, the irony of the situation is there for all to see.
Chinese citizens with a thirst for non-censored news and social media resort to virtual private networks—or VPNs—to hide their IP addresses, secure their traffic and access sites that would not be available without such masking. This week, the curious folk at one of those VPNs—Nord—decided to take a look at what those Chinese citizens craved most, what it was they most wanted to use a VPN to access. It turns out that it’s not Facebook, Twitter or the BBC—it’s Google and YouTube, and by some considerable margin.
Nord drew its conclusions by analysing search terms on Baidu—China’s dominant search engine. The team looked for queries that included “VPN” and then checked the rest of the search—how do I use a VPN to access Google, for example. In its release, Nord says it “estimated search volumes using multiple sources of information, including Google, Ahrefs, and DragonMetrics. The analyzed search queries included the keyword ‘VPN’. The analysis was based on search volumes over a period of 30 days.”
A Nord spokesperson told me “the circumvention of the Great Firewall has puzzled the Chinese government for years. Whenever a government announces an increase in surveillance, internet restrictions, or other types of constraints, people turn to privacy tools.” Hong Kong put this into perspective. “We first registered a surge in VPN demand in Hong Kong in May, when the government announced the upcoming law. The number of inquiries went up 120 times within a couple of hours compared to the day before.”
TikTok has now setup a website dedicated to setting the record straight, it says, given the bombastic rhetoric flying around Washington. Clearly, in the U.S., whether or not you buy into the “TikTok is a Trojan horse spying for China” allegations, those making the claims feel the need to offer some form of justification or reasoning at least—in China sites are just banned.
“At TikTok we welcome competition,” the company’s American CEO—Kevin Mayer is quoted on the new site. “We think fair competition makes all of us better. To those who wish to launch competitive products, we say bring it on.”
TikTok is also somewhat amusingly banned in China. But it’s owned (for the time being) by ByteDance, a Beijing unicorn that also operates Douyin, a Chinese sister-app that certainly seems to be spying on its users. Douyin doesn’t need to face down Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. “Fair competition” and that “bring it on” attitude do not travel quite that far east.
Trump’s sell or be banned threat “sets a dangerous precedent for the concept of free expression and open markets,” TikTok says.
Taking a purely objective stance on TikTok and the evidence thus far of any data wrongdoing, there does need to be some form of third-party monitoring and regulation. The risk of disinformation and aggregated data analysis is certainly real. On the basis of security, though, there’s no evidence that suggests the threat is so critical as to warrant an emergency sale.
Many commentators have criticized the U.S. forcing a corporate sale, given the lack of a smoking gun to prove the spying claims. But taking an ethical and moral perspective, it might be justified for a Chinese social media entity to lose the ability to benefit from free media access and the rule of law in the U.S. when it’s not reciprocated. Harsh for ByteDance, perhaps, but fair’s fair for Beijing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...st-wanted-list-tiktok-trump-ban/#5f11b6cb6864
Chinese citizens with a thirst for non-censored news and social media resort to virtual private networks—or VPNs—to hide their IP addresses, secure their traffic and access sites that would not be available without such masking. This week, the curious folk at one of those VPNs—Nord—decided to take a look at what those Chinese citizens craved most, what it was they most wanted to use a VPN to access. It turns out that it’s not Facebook, Twitter or the BBC—it’s Google and YouTube, and by some considerable margin.
Nord drew its conclusions by analysing search terms on Baidu—China’s dominant search engine. The team looked for queries that included “VPN” and then checked the rest of the search—how do I use a VPN to access Google, for example. In its release, Nord says it “estimated search volumes using multiple sources of information, including Google, Ahrefs, and DragonMetrics. The analyzed search queries included the keyword ‘VPN’. The analysis was based on search volumes over a period of 30 days.”
A Nord spokesperson told me “the circumvention of the Great Firewall has puzzled the Chinese government for years. Whenever a government announces an increase in surveillance, internet restrictions, or other types of constraints, people turn to privacy tools.” Hong Kong put this into perspective. “We first registered a surge in VPN demand in Hong Kong in May, when the government announced the upcoming law. The number of inquiries went up 120 times within a couple of hours compared to the day before.”
TikTok has now setup a website dedicated to setting the record straight, it says, given the bombastic rhetoric flying around Washington. Clearly, in the U.S., whether or not you buy into the “TikTok is a Trojan horse spying for China” allegations, those making the claims feel the need to offer some form of justification or reasoning at least—in China sites are just banned.
“At TikTok we welcome competition,” the company’s American CEO—Kevin Mayer is quoted on the new site. “We think fair competition makes all of us better. To those who wish to launch competitive products, we say bring it on.”
TikTok is also somewhat amusingly banned in China. But it’s owned (for the time being) by ByteDance, a Beijing unicorn that also operates Douyin, a Chinese sister-app that certainly seems to be spying on its users. Douyin doesn’t need to face down Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. “Fair competition” and that “bring it on” attitude do not travel quite that far east.
Trump’s sell or be banned threat “sets a dangerous precedent for the concept of free expression and open markets,” TikTok says.
Taking a purely objective stance on TikTok and the evidence thus far of any data wrongdoing, there does need to be some form of third-party monitoring and regulation. The risk of disinformation and aggregated data analysis is certainly real. On the basis of security, though, there’s no evidence that suggests the threat is so critical as to warrant an emergency sale.
Many commentators have criticized the U.S. forcing a corporate sale, given the lack of a smoking gun to prove the spying claims. But taking an ethical and moral perspective, it might be justified for a Chinese social media entity to lose the ability to benefit from free media access and the rule of law in the U.S. when it’s not reciprocated. Harsh for ByteDance, perhaps, but fair’s fair for Beijing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...st-wanted-list-tiktok-trump-ban/#5f11b6cb6864
