‘Is That True?’: Washington Post Reporter Questions TikTok’s Link to CCP 

I actually have no idea where TikTok is based, Taylor Lorenz admits to the customers.

Washington Post technology columnist Taylor Lorenz, the self-described “most online reporter that you can find” said Thursday in a discussion hosted by the libertarian magazine Reason that she doesn’t know where TikTok is headquartered or that a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member holds an executive position with the tech company’s parent, ByteDance.

She remarked,” I actually have no idea where TikTok is based. ” Umm. Singapore was where the Director was. Um. He is therefore present, and after that, it is [ sic ] run regionally throughout the world by the United States.

The former writer for the New York Times also questioned whether it was” correct” that a CCP international works in the top placement at ByteDance. ” Is that accurate? Is that accurate? Is that accurate? Lorenz remarked. Zhang Fuping, the editor in chief of ByteDance, is a repository of the Chinese Community Party.

Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of Tik Tok, is based in Singapore and was questioned during a high-profile legislative hearing about which Lorenz wrote. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is based in Beijing and has a close relationship with the CCP. Lorenz recently traveled to the company’s headquarters’s to write about the” charm offensive” of the business.

The contentious journalist, a TikTok user herself, seemed to laugh off worries about the platform’s potential’s threats to national security and praised the tech company for its algorithm for giving its users more power. TikTok’s individual’s may be a tool for CCP change in the US, according to testimony from FBI Director Chris Wray from last November.

The company launched the Democratic advocacy solid SKDK last month, which has close ties to the Biden White House, and Lorenz’s remarks’s come as the company is waging its own massive public relations campaign. They also show how some of the nation” top journalists are sympathetic to TikTok’apprehension.

Lorenz, who was present at a 16-year-old TikTok celebrity birthday’s occasion, declined to comment when contacted.

Lorenz claimed she was” dying” at the alleged ignorance of the lawmakers who grilled Chew during the Reason discussion. Additionally, she wrote a fact-check late last month criticizing Republican legislators who took part in the reading. She demanded an explanation for allegedly misleading claims the politicians rarely made in emails to their assistants that were obtained by the Free Beacon.

Cathy McMorris-Rodgers ( R., Wash. ) claimed that TikTok users cannot post unfavorable content about China in an email to Lorenz asking for comment. According to a review of her inquiries, McMorris Rodgers questioned Chew about TikTok’s history’s of censoring Tiananmen Square-related articles. And TikTok undoubtedly had: According to leaked documents outlining the project’s moderation’s policies, a 2019 Guardianreport stated that the company ‘ content moderators should” judge movies that mention Tiananmen Square, Chinese democracy, or the banned religious team Falun Gong.”

She also asserted that Rep. Bob Latta( D., Va.) had misrepresented TikTok as the source of the” blackout challenge ,” in which kids are urged to hold their breath until they pass out. Instead of doing so, the lawmaker questioned Chew about TikTok’s lack’s of action to temper such challenges. Latta discussed the death of a 10-year-old girl who passed away in Pennsylvania after attempting the shutdown difficulty that she saw trending on TikTok. Two families sued TikTok last summer after their children died of self-sufficiency, and the girl’s parents’s hold them responsible for the death of their daughter.

Lorenz pursued Rep. using a comparable strategy. Buddy Carter for making the connection between TikTok and the” weary soup” style, in which customers cook meats in NyQuil cough sugar. In her piece, she writes that sleepy chicken was” never” a TikTok trend and told Carter that his questions were” false.” Don’t tell her company, which in October 2022 published a piece describing the drowsy bird as” a TikTok contest in which people boil an entire poultry in over-the-counter cough and cold medicine.”

Lorenz stated during the discussion on Thursday that she doesn’t think the government is responsible for policing false information and propaganda on the internet. When people say,” I want some sort of censorship because I talk about misinformation ,” it always seems bizarre to me. I’ve never’ve once said that the government should be deciding what constitutes false information or censoring content on social media, she continued.

How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks jump its propaganda efforts is the title of a lengthy investigation by Lorenz into the decision to dissolve its Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz, the head of the disbanded board, claimed that she had been the target of coordinated on disorders.