A photo has surfaced showing top executives at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, posing with members of the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s communist flag.
The photo: Chinese-born human rights activist Jennifer Zeng published the image to her blog on Wednesday after President Donald Trump promised to ban TikTok from the United States due to security concerns.
- Trump followed through on the threat on Thursday by signing an executive order that gave Microsoft or another U.S. company until Sept. 15 to acquire the popular video-sharing app.
The event: Zeng pulled the photo from a Chinese news report about a meeting at ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters on July 24, 2019.
- The report was headlined, “Never forget the original intention, remember the mission, and promote the new era of Overseas Chinese Federation information communication work,” according to Zeng’s translation
- Zeng translated from the text: “Zuo Zhiqiang, secretary of the CCP’s Information Dissemination Department, discussed the new era of information dissemination and the goals of using technology to spread propaganda and to manage the internet with the development of artificial intelligence, overseas capacity, and network security.”
- Zeng described the goal of the event to Taiwan News on Thursday as to find ways to “preserve the CCP’s power and promote CCP’s model to the world.”
No big deal?: TikTok and some of its most popular users have sought to downplay the Trump administration’s concerns about its potential abuses in areas like user privacy, censorship and misinformation.
- The Chinese company will reportedly sue the administration this week, claiming the ban is unconstitutional because it failed to give the company a chance to respond.
- The lawsuit will also allege that the administration’s national security justification for the order is baseless, an anonymous source told NPR.
According to Human Rights Watch, though, TikTok, like many big Chinese companies, is overseen by an internal Chinese Communist Party committee.
- Like all Chinese companies, ByteDance is beholden to the dictates of the regime and is also required by security laws to spread information online that is beneficial to the party.
- Last April, ByteDance signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security’s Press and Publicity Bureau to, among other things, enhance “public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility.”
