BS 124 – The Truth About The TikTok Ban

BS 124

[00:00:00] Cameron: Alright, yeah, both of you give me a one, two, three, one at a time, Ray.

[00:00:15] Ray: One, two, three.

[00:00:18] Tony: Oh, is that how you do it? Okay.

[00:00:19] Ray: I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I really don’t.

[00:00:24] Tony: Four, five, six.

[00:00:27] Cameron: just to be clever. Welcome back to the Bullshit Fielder episode 124, recording this on the 22nd of March, 2024, uh, with me today, um, my two, uh, but you know, this is like a threesome, uh, rare

[00:00:46] Ray: An intellectually threesome. Yes. Yeah.

[00:00:50] Cameron: wife number two, Ray Harris, and, uh,

[00:00:54] Ray: been demoted.

[00:00:55] Cameron: Wife number three, Toni Kynaston. Um, I feel like, like a fundamentalist, uh, Mormon right now with everyone.

[00:01:05] Cameron: Get Chrissy in here and it’ll be scary.

[00:01:07] Tony: Well, I only get Cameron on Tuesday, so now I’m being promoted, I get Friday as well.

[00:01:12] Cameron: Big love. Once a month, once a month on the Friday, yeah.

[00:01:16] Tony: right.

[00:01:18] Cameron: Um, alright, well, um, Tony, Tony had such a good time last time he was on the bullshit filter. He said he wanted to come back and, and Ray’s happy because it means he needs to do even less work. Which, uh, less than

[00:01:32] Ray: that is correct.

[00:01:34] Cameron: Negative

[00:01:35] Ray: Negative. Yeah. Negative one third.

[00:01:38] Cameron: We’re going to cover a couple of stories today.

[00:01:40] Cameron: We’re going to try to anyway. Uh, we’re going to talk about the TikTok ban that’s happening, not just in the US, but there’s hints that it’s going to happen in other places as well, like Australia. Uh, we’re going to take a newspaper headline, a front page of a newspaper each and, and deconstruct it. And we’re going to talk a little bit at the end about China’s economy, so let’s, that’s a lot.

[00:02:03] Cameron: I’ve got a lot of notes here, so we’ll see how we get, how far we get. Who wants to start with the TikTok ban? Who wants to be the first cab off the rank? With that?

[00:02:15] Ray: Well, I do know this. Um, the House of Representatives have passed a version. The Senate is working on their version, which it means if it passes it, we’ll have to go to the House to then be reconciled. Um, it will be in committee for a while, so if it is going to happen, it is going to be still quite some time down the road, and even if it does pass the current bill, say, we’ll The company has six months to divest themselves.

[00:02:39] Ray: And so for the people in America who are freaking out like me, cause I pretty much give it, it’s my new crack cocaine, uh, Tik Tok is. And, um, so if it does happen, it’s not going to happen right away. But, um, again, I guess it goes to the very fundamental. The question of, you know, for, um, freedom of speech, um, we all know that Facebook steals our, our, our, our information.

[00:03:02] Ray: They sell it, whatever. Is TikTok doing anything else that any of these other social, uh, companies are doing? Are they just doing it for the Chinese government? So it’s a whole bunch of shit. There’s a lot of people in America who are absolutely pissed, even at the idea, the, the chance that this could go through.

[00:03:18] Ray: What are y’all hearing on your side of the pond, of the

[00:03:21] Cameron: I know why. I know why You like TikTok rage. I just realized it because they call it short form content and

[00:03:27] Ray: Yes. It matches me perfectly.

[00:03:30] Cameron: Yeah, yeah. Just you have loyalty to anything that’s short.

[00:03:33] Ray: in fact, in fact, most of the TikToks are too long. If I had to complain about anything, but yeah, yeah. Short and

[00:03:40] Tony: well, I mean, if someone, someone of our, some of the Raise Vintage and Our Vintage is on TikTok, is it dead anyway? Is it going to last six months? Really?

[00:03:49] Ray: Yeah.

[00:03:49] Cameron: yeah, that’s true. That’s what Taylor keeps telling me. TikTok’s dead. Anyway,

[00:03:54] Ray: Well, what’s

[00:03:55] Cameron: this is, this is a really, I don’t know, um, uh, shorter, shorter form content.

[00:04:00] Ray: Just a tick. Just a tick. Tick. Tick.

[00:04:03] Cameron: just the tip, just the tip. That’s what it’s going to be. Tip, tip, tip top is going to be called. Just the

[00:04:09] Ray: We’re going to be rich.

[00:04:12] Cameron: I found this, um, really interesting to dive into because I think what we’re looking at here is a whole bunch of conjoined interests.

[00:04:25] Cameron: When, when you do the Quibono. Follow the money, who benefits? There’s a whole bunch of parties, I think, that benefit from this, overlapping interests, conjoined interests. So, and I, because obviously we’re trying to answer the question, well, why is this? Well, I mean, okay, so there’s the official story, which is China bad, China spying, etc, etc.

[00:04:48] Ray: Right.

[00:04:49] Cameron: If we accept that, that, at least, if that is true at all, at all. As the reason for it, it’s only one of the reasons for it, and you start to look at who benefits, or who would benefit from this. It becomes quite fascinating. There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, I think. But, before we talk about the US, uh, Tony, are you aware of the Australian, uh, calls to ban TikTok coming out of the coalition’s cyber security spokesperson, Senator James Patterson?

[00:05:21] Tony: I am. Yeah, I actually, actually found a list of all the countries in the world that have banned TikTok. I’m just trying to find it now, but they fall into two camps. One’s like in Australia, because TikTok’s banned for government employees in Australia, which it is across all the five I’s. So, Canada. New Zealand, us, England, I think India’s the fifth member, anyway, they’re all banned on government issued phones and tablets.

[00:05:48] Tony: And then there are other countries who generally have a problem with China, anyway, countries like Pakistan, Taiwan, Nepal, who have banned TikTok as well. So, you know, that’s It’s a thing, but I agree with you, Cam. I think this is one of the, this is a case of, you know, there’s a hundred or a thousand issues crossing the desks of politicians all the time.

[00:06:14] Tony: But as soon as someone with a bit of money spots one and thinks, I don’t really care about TikTok, but I can get behind this because it suits me. That’s the one that gets prevalence and gets traction. And, uh, so I think you’re right. I think, um, I think it, you know, the traditional line is a media hype.

[00:06:30] Tony: Social media because it’s stolen their news feed and subscribers are down because they’re going to, they get free news from Google, they get free news from Meta or TikTok or whatever. So they hate it. Um, so it’s a divide and conquer strategy by them, but also too, if ByteDance has to divest, which is kind of an interesting strategy to take by the government.

[00:06:51] Tony: No, we don’t want to get rid of TikTok, you just have to sell it. Well, who’s going to buy it? It’s probably Facebook. So you get concentration in the social media space. You’ve got concentration in the traditional media space and they do a deal when everyone’s happy. So that’s, that’s what I think is behind all this.

[00:07:06] Cameron: Yeah, I agree, Tony, and I think there’s some other parties there, but the large media companies is definitely, I think, one of them that has an interest in this. But just getting back to the Australian guy, I had a laugh at this, Senator James Patterson, who’s been on this, you know, for a couple of years. He, um, said that, uh, data on the more than 8 million Australians who use TikTok could be used to build a very sophisticated picture of our society.

[00:07:32] Ray: Hmm.

[00:07:32] Cameron: the fear. They might build a very sophisticated I was thinking, well, they could just watch Neighbours. Are we going to ban China from watching Neighbours? I mean, like, he won’t and he also is talking about TikTok having alternative ownership, so. I mean, just the fact that China would need to Our number one trading partner, who owns half of the country now, would need to use TikTok to develop a very sophisticated picture of our society, I find.

[00:08:04] Cameron: Just

[00:08:04] Tony: Yeah, or they’re trained.

[00:08:05] Cameron: statement to make.

[00:08:06] Tony: And the other argument I’ve heard is it’s going to be used by China to train its AI. in um, English language. I’m like, mate, if you’re not trying an AI based on Australians watching TikTok, it’s gotta be a very skewed picture. Good luck to you,

[00:08:21] Cameron: here’s one of the main arguments I had against the official narrative of this, is when you drill down into it, there seems to be very little backing it up. So the official story, of course, is, you know, China’s spying, or might spy, or could be spying on Americans. But, when they had congressional hearings and the CEO of TikTok was on the, on the, you know, the, the, whatever it is, what do you want when you’re being in a congressional, he’s not on the stand, but, he’s being, he’s being questioned, he kept saying to the Congresswoman I saw, Or a senator who was challenging him.

[00:08:57] Cameron: He was like, I’ve seen no evidence that this is actually happening. Do you have any? She was just going, oh, I find it very hard to believe. And he kept saying, well, where’s the evidence? She’s going, well, I’m just sure there is. And so I, in nothing that I saw, was there any evidence? But anyway, we’ll get into that.

[00:09:14] Cameron: So a bit of background for people that are confused about this, because I was. Trump. So this started under Trump back in 2020. Trump said he was gonna ban TikTok, and he signed an executive order in 2020 saying he was gonna ban TikTok, gave them a period of months in which to either sell their business or do something, um, as well as WeChat, wasn’t just TikTok, it was also WeChat, and he also had the thing with Huawei, Huawei.

[00:09:46] Cameron: where he was banning them and they, the Canadians grabbed the chief financial officer or something of your way at the time. Um, the Chinese government at the time called it a smash and grab forced sale and, and I, I tend to agree with that today. I think that’s what this is at the end of the day. I think it’s a smash and grab.

[00:10:06] Cameron: They’re basically just trying to figure out a way to crush TikTok and steal it, you know, for a, buy it in a fire sale. Um, they, the, the TikTok fought against Trump in the U. S. with this. They claimed he was doing it as retaliation for TikTok campaigns against his reelection. And they were given a preliminary injunction by the courts against Trump’s order.

[00:10:36] Cameron: So they, the, the court stopped his order and then he left government. So it all kind of, you know, fell off the radar sort of in January 2021 when Biden was sworn in. About six months later, Biden signed an executive order revoking Trump’s ban on TikTok, but ordering the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the app to determine if it did indeed pose a threat to U.

[00:11:04] Cameron: S. national security. Now, we did some stories about this at the time, I remember a few years ago, and one of the things that, um, we found at the time was that Facebook, or Meta, Facebook’s parent company now, Zuckerberg, had paid, uh, Public relations firm that had previously worked for the Republicans to, uh, according to, I’m reading this from the Washington Post’s article.

[00:11:31] Cameron: This is going back to March, 2022. It said, Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok. The campaign Includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and drawing and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.

[00:12:04] Cameron: These bare knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young. So we, you know, we know that Meta is running a campaign and whenever you see this, situation where claims are being made, but when you ask for evidence of the claims, there are none.

[00:12:34] Cameron: And people just go, you know, don’t look into my eyes. Don’t look into my eyes. Don’t look into my eyes. Don’t look around my eyes. Look into my eyes. Look at my eyes. It immediately, I’m like, Oh, okay, what’s going on here? And then you combine that with Meder, among others, probably are running a massive. PR campaign trying to convince, you know, a lobby government to do this.

[00:12:55] Ray: yeah.

[00:12:56] Cameron: starts to smell, it starts to smell very quickly, very, uh, badly. So anyway, so, uh, Biden did this thing, um, said that they had to, the Secretary of Commerce had to investigate it and that’s been going on. Now, meanwhile, late last year, the state of Montana banned it, but a federal judge Again, stopped it, called the measure unconstitutional.

[00:13:19] Cameron: So then, now they’re trying to do it via Congress. They’ve got this thing called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act

[00:13:27] Ray: Wow.

[00:13:29] Cameron: that passed 352 to 65, as Ray was indicating before. Now, and this is interesting, they’ve done this before. Now, um, I know you would have followed this much more closely than I did, um, Ray, but in March of 2020, they forced the Chinese owners of Grindr to sell the application, um, because of its connection to China.

[00:13:57] Ray: Can I just say, worst day of my life.

[00:14:00] Tony: Is that why Ray’s smoking a pipe now?

[00:14:03] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:14:03] Tony: He’s thinking

[00:14:03] Ray: That’s all I got. That’s all I got to do with my hands.

[00:14:07] Cameron: yeah, and your

[00:14:07] Tony: And your mouth.

[00:14:08] Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:10] Ray: Thanks, Tony. Thanks.

[00:14:12] Cameron: Tony’s just slid right into the, uh, right into the tone of this podcast. So easily, isn’t he?

[00:14:19] Ray: little too easy.

[00:14:25] Cameron: So, uh, a Chinese company called Kunlun, Had acquired a hundred percent ownership of Grindr. Uh, well, it was 98. 59 percent actually of the company. They had to sell it, uh, because of, you know, basically the government came after them. They, this is great. They sold it to a US based company called San Vincente Acquisition LLC, March 2020 at a valuation of 608.

[00:14:51] Cameron: 5 million. Less than 18 months later, Grindr went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Guess what the valuation was at that point?

[00:15:05] Ray: Bye.

[00:15:06] Cameron: 1 billion dollars. Went from 608 million to 2. 1 billion dollars in under 18 months. November 2022, they went public. Now the way they went public is great. It was, they didn’t IPO.

[00:15:20] Cameron: They, it was via a SPAC. Tony, explain to everyone what a SPAC is.

[00:15:27] Tony: You can’t say that anymore, Cam. No, it’s a special acquisition, special acquisition, special acquisition company. So there was a thing back in the last sort of tech boom, especially around COVID, where In Australia you couldn’t do it, but in America you could, so it’s called listing a cash box. So basically it’s taking a fund, which doesn’t have anything in it, just the cash that’s been put into it by investors, and then IPO ing it, listing it on the exchange in the US.

[00:16:00] Tony: I think the law allowed them to have, I think, two years before they had to invest and buy something. And that’s one of the reasons why tech companies went for a run around that COVID time, was because you had all this money sloshing around that had two years to find something to acquire, and they were overpaying for things, basically.

[00:16:20] Cameron: It’s like the craziest fucking story. The way these things work, people just sink, you know, a couple hundred billion dollars into a vehicle, float it, it’s got no business, no cash flow, no nothing, but they go, Eh, we’ll buy something. And the deal was, yeah, you had a period of time you had to buy something, otherwise you had to give the money back to investors. So, um, a particular SPAC at the time called TIGA, T I G A Acquisition Corp, based in Singapore, uh, Why? Hmm, who knows. Um, acquired Grindr, and then, um, you know, it was publicly listed, like, bang,

[00:17:02] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[00:17:03] Cameron: Um, now, I went into details. Who owns San Vincente Acquisition? Who owned Tiger? Surprisingly, Uh, I’d buy the same guy, um, a guy called Raymond Zage, who’s, um, now got something to do with Australia, according to his Twitter feed, but, um, he was the founder and CEO of Tiger Acquisition Corp, and also part of the San Vincente Partners Consortium that acquired it, um, so they, It, the shares, when it, when it went public, the shares went from 10 bucks to 70 bucks. And then there was a lot of selling and it quickly dropped to 4. 60. But

[00:17:50] Ray: when I’d get in.

[00:17:51] Cameron: where it’s been ever since. Yeah. No, you would’ve got in at 70 and it’s going to the moon and it dropped down to 4. 60.

[00:18:02] Ray: Sell, sell, sell!

[00:18:03] Tony: Well, and I guess the other question is, cam, we can’t track this, but did, did Raymond make many donations to a political, uh, party in the US to one of the packs over there?

[00:18:15] Cameron: yeah, possibly, I mean, I, I didn’t drill down that far, you can track some of that stuff. The point here I wanted to make is that, um, the, the, the Chinese owners were planning on floating grinder. Um, couldn’t. Shut down by the US government. So then Americans were able to acquire Grinder, bump up the valuation, float it.

[00:18:43] Cameron: Somebody sold a shit ton of shares at 70 bucks. Um, I’m not, I don’t know who, but I’m not casting aspersions, but somebody sold a shitload of shares and it was only like, uh, 500, 000 shares available in the public float. I mean, the rest were all, you know, Owned by the people behind the acquisition, the SPAC.

[00:19:08] Cameron: And, um, yeah, and, and a lot of people lost a lot of money. Obviously the people that bought in between 10 and 70 were deeply underwater and a lot, and, and the people that own this thing made a lot of money.

[00:19:21] Cameron: So, my point is that we’ve seen this before and, and in that case, it does very much look like it was a smash and grab to get this Chinese IP floated and somebody made a shit ton of money out of it. So the question then is what’s this really all about, the TikTok one? So, national security, as Tony pointed out, It’s already banned on government phones all around the world.

[00:19:41] Cameron: Um, corporations, if they have concern about security, can ban it from their phones. What’s really the national security concern when it comes to consumers phones? There’s this idea that, oh, they, they, they can develop this picture of what Americans are talking about on their phone, or they can maybe malware in the app.

[00:20:05] Cameron: But as part of the whole Trump thing. TikTok spent a shit ton of money to migrate all of their US customer data over to Oracle. And it’s a thing called Project Texas, because Oracle’s based in Texas. Um, and they’ve already done all of that. They’ve transferred 100%, supposedly, of their US customer data to Oracle’s cloud.

[00:20:30] Cameron: So, the first question, and, but, but now they’re claiming the, the Congressional hearings and all the Senators are claiming, We have leaked reports that the CCP is still getting access to all of U. S. customer data. So the first question I would have is, great, we’ll put the Oracle, put Larry Ellison, put the Oracle team on the stand and ask them, Well, how are they getting access to this?

[00:20:55] Cameron: You’re supposed to be controlling the security of all of this. Funnily, Uh, no one’s asking Oracle to provide evidence that the Oracle system that was put into place to protect US data is failing. The only thing I could see, uh, like no one from Oracle in the congressional hearings, uh, I think it was, uh, New York Times article said they reached out to Oracle for comment and Oracle declined. So surely if, if they’ve, if TikTok have spent a ton of migrating everything over to Oracle to protect the security of the US data, and if they’re suggesting that’s not working, that’s on Oracle.

[00:21:40] Ray: Yeah.

[00:21:41] Cameron: They should be forcing Oracle to divest its shares. But there’s no talk about that. I mean, unless I’m missing something.

[00:21:48] Cameron: Did you see anything about, Oracle being questioned about why the CCP is still getting access to US data?

[00:21:54] Tony: nothing.

[00:21:55] Cameron: would be the obvious question, right?

[00:21:57] Tony: of articles about that particular issue and, and uh, there was one from USA, a story from USA Today, and the quote is, uh, these threats are not theoretical, that’s the threat of data access by the CCP. In 2022, ByteDance admitted its China based employees brazenly access sensitive TikTok geolocation data to monitor American journalists.

[00:22:22] Tony: And they go on to say, this and subsequent revelations make clear that TikTok and other Chinese technology platforms are morphing into fully fledged state instruments of surveillance.

[00:22:33] Cameron: But that was before they migrated all over to Oracle.

[00:22:36] Tony: right. Well, I was gonna, I was gonna make the point that, um, do they, did the Chinese government really need to access TikTok data to track people?

[00:22:48] Ray: Thank you.

[00:22:50] Tony: If they do, you know,

[00:22:52] Ray: Yes.

[00:22:57] Tony: they don’t have ByteDance’s data, but they seem to be pretty good at tracking down and surveilling people.

[00:23:03] Tony: So I think it’s a bit of a spurious argument myself.

[00:23:07] Cameron: I agree. And, but I, I want to point, I, I get the security concerns. I’m not, I’m not, Pissing on the idea of, you know, security concerns and also the idea of foreign media, foreign media ownership. If you accept that TikTok is a media

[00:23:24] Tony: Mm hmm.

[00:23:26] Cameron: and a lot of people, like apparently half of America, has TikTok on their phones and particularly with younger 20s, they’re on TikTok all the time.

[00:23:35] Cameron: So it is a place where they get news. I mean, mostly. Dancing, and lip syncing, and comedy, but, but,

[00:23:45] Ray: That’s how I like my news. Yeah. That’s how I like my news. Yeah. Today.

[00:23:49] Cameron: to have, we used to have foreign media ownership laws. In Australia, until former Prime Minister John Howard scrapped them in 2007. And just, you know, I amped up cross media ownership, so you can only owe 2 out of 3.

[00:24:04] Cameron: And there was this, when that happened, there was this big, um, gobbling up of media in Australia. We now, you know, Most of our media is owned by either News Limited, Rupert Murdoch, or Nine Entertainment. Um, is News Limited a foreign owned entity? Um, I think probably it is. Rupert’s an American citizen. And that leads me to the next one.

[00:24:34] Cameron: America used to have laws against foreign media ownership as well, which is why Rupert Murdoch needed to become an American citizen when he started acquiring television stations to build Fox back in the 90s. He owned newspapers in the U. S. before that, uh, but in order to own TV stations, he needed to be an American citizen.

[00:24:53] Cameron: But then they got rid of that. The U. S. got rid of that 10 years ago as well. So 10 years ago, America said, you know what? We don’t need to worry about foreign media ownership anymore. We can scrap the foreign media ownership laws. Um, But now all of a sudden, we need to ban TikTok because it’s owned by a foreign adversary, which is a whole other thing.

[00:25:15] Cameron: I wanted to ask, when did China become an adversary? I thought they were your number one trading partner slash manufacturing outsourcer. Now all of a sudden they’re a foreign adversary. I guess they can be both. By the way, up until last year, Forbes, Magazine slash website was owned by a Hong Kong company.

[00:25:38] Cameron: Um, Hong Kong was also China. Um, but they only hold a minority stake today. There’s a German company, Axel Springer, that owns Business Insider and Politico. Um, so you still have, you know, foreign media or media organizations in the U. S. owned by foreign companies.

[00:25:59] Tony: And you can reverse Well you can reverse your argument about Rupert Murdoch and say he’s an Australian. I mean is it, if, if those other companies you mentioned, if their CEOs took out US citizens, if, if Xi Jinping took out US citizenship, he’d be able to buy, uh, media companies in the US. I mean, it’s a bit of a technicality.

[00:26:18] Cameron: Yeah, yeah, they might, uh, they, they might have to take a hard look at that if you try to become an American citizen, or any Chinese, any Chinese citizen. Could do it.

[00:26:28] Ray: right.

[00:26:29] Cameron: So, look, the whole security concerns thing I find, again, and when the CEO of TikTok asked them to present evidence, they just sort of, uh, rolled their eyes, they couldn’t provide him with anything, so, I haven’t seen any evidence for this, apart from, there were some claims that, uh, there were some leaked emails from TikTok employees saying that the CCP was still looking at it, But, you know, how much of that is real versus Meta’s PR campaign is difficult to tell,

[00:27:03] Tony: Well, there’s an interesting article I came across when I was doing research on this. It’s by our old friend Alan Kohler in The Guardian. And he, he, um, is Rallying against TikTok, I guess. I guess, you know, traditional media person rallying against TikTok. What’s new there? But he paints two reasons for that.

[00:27:24] Tony: One is the TikTok pixel, which he, uh, which he says, I’ll quote, All social media collect web browsing data on their users for advertisers to better target their ads. And while TikTok does that, it also gathers email addresses, phone numbers, locations, the destination of phone and video calls, the device’s metadata and more.

[00:27:48] Tony: It’s like a listening bug in the person’s home, as well as a GPS tag in their car, without their knowledge or consent. Permission is given in the T’s and C’s, of course, but no one ever reads them. So, he’s saying that TikTok goes further than the other pixels that are used by Whatever else. Um, but you know, the counterargument to that is, he’s probably got Alexa in his phone, listening to everything he says anyway, so,

[00:28:14] Cameron: which

[00:28:14] Tony: I’m not buying that one.

[00:28:16] Cameron: built in

[00:28:16] Tony: Um, but the other point he made, and this gets back to your, why is the conservative coalition in Australia against TikTok, um, he talks about, um, the fact that there is a, He says, right now, TikTok appears to be favouring pro harmless videos, and during last year’s voice referendum campaign in Australia, it appeared to favour the no case.

[00:28:36] Tony: So he’s also mounting the argument that TikTok is biased. And I think that’s what’s getting the conservative side of politics in Australia excited about TikTok and it being banned.

[00:28:47] Cameron: So that’s the second argument that is being made in the U. S. is that their TikTok are using their algorithm to influence the views of young Americans about political issues like Ukraine, like Gaza, and ostensibly the upcoming presidential election. So there, uh, the Department of Energy and Commerce that Biden told to, to do an investigation of this, I read their report.

[00:29:18] Cameron: One of the things they said was a recent office of the director of National Intelligence, ODNI report showed that the CCP was using TikTok to target political candidates and influenced to 2022 election cycle. But I went to the ODNI. Report that they referenced and when you go to that report, it just says that TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.

[00:29:51] Cameron: S. midterm election cycle in 2022. So they’re not like, so when you read the, the energy and commerce thing, it suggests that they’re hacking TikTok to influence stuff. No, they just set up some fucking accounts where they were doing TikTok videos, which they could do if it was owned by Americans. Like,

[00:30:10] Ray: Yes.

[00:30:11] Tony: Which happens on Meta. I

[00:30:14] Cameron: everything.

[00:30:15] Tony: welcome, you know, recall back to the Cambridge Analytica controversy during the Trump campaign. It’s the same deal.

[00:30:22] Cameron: And again, this is, this is sort of my point here, is when the department that has been appointed by Biden to investigate this for the last three years, in their official report, building a case for it, that’s the best they can come up with? And they, and they kind of give you, like, their report goes, well, the ODNI found that, But when you go and read the report, it’s a fucking nothing burger in the report.

[00:30:53] Ray: Whoop!

[00:30:53] Cameron: just the skinny, if that’s the best they could come up with after three years, is well, they set up some fake accounts on TikTok to try and influence, like really? That’s it. That’s what you’ve got.

[00:31:08] Tony: But also too, my rebuttal to the alleged bias with TikTok is, thank God, because the mainstream media is full of pro Israel stories. So, of course, you know, the other side is going to get squeezed in too. Doing TikTok videos or, or, you know, making their points known through the Guardian or whatever else they do.

[00:31:28] Tony: Of course they are. There’s no room for it in mainstream media.

[00:31:31] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:31:33] Ray: Well, it’s like you said, um, like you said, just, excuse me, it’s like you said a second ago, Cam, it’s a, it’s a sexy headline with a nothing burger inside the actual details, and that’s where you have to go is check out the details. So, yeah, it’s tantalizing as long as you don’t read the report. And on a side note, didn’t Rupert just recently get married?

[00:31:52] Ray: I’d like to wish him and

[00:31:54] Tony: He’s about to.

[00:31:55] Ray: bro a good bow too. I hope they have, um, all the happiness and, and for decades. Decades to

[00:32:01] Cameron: many happy

[00:32:02] Tony: He’s marrying a, he’s engaged to a Russian. So,

[00:32:06] Ray: that should be illegal. That should be illegal. I’m sorry. I don’t know what, I don’t know anything about it. I’m sure

[00:32:12] Tony: your media, your foreign media ownership laws, they’re like a wet paper bag over there. Come on,

[00:32:17] Ray: if you got enough money, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t freaking matter. And going back to,

[00:32:22] Cameron: media ownership laws. That’s my point. They scrapped

[00:32:24] Ray: we got rid of, well, they get in the way of making money, and that’s what America is all about. And going back to Cam’s question about China, um, And I think we’ve touched on this before, but World War II and the Cold War really shaped America.

[00:32:37] Ray: We don’t really know where we stand, unless we have an enemy. They don’t have to be a real enemy, they just have to be a declared by us enemy. Then we have something to focus on and it justifies our massive military budgets. But, again, the um, The reverberations of Cold War, uh, Cold War history will be with America for a long time.

[00:32:58] Ray: If it’s not China, it’s gonna be somebody else. We have to have an adversary because if you don’t, then you’re just left with trying to have a good life and America doesn’t do that very well. We need to be fighting. We need to be pitted against someone.

[00:33:15] Cameron: Well, I can tell you who your adversaries are because I looked it up. So, as I said before, this new congressional act is saying that they’re gonna ban any app that’s owned or controlled by a foreign adversary. My first question is, when did China become a foreign adversary? I couldn’t figure out. Um, when, the closest I can come, I could come, to finding out when China was first declared a foreign adversary by the United States was during the Trump administration.

[00:33:47] Cameron: Uh, to the best of my knowledge, that’s when they suddenly decided China was a foreign adversary. Now, according to the definitions, a foreign adversary is a nation or an entity that poses a strategic, military, or economic threat, to To another country’s national security, interests, or values.

[00:34:06] Ray: Right.

[00:34:08] Cameron: So, any country that’s competing with you, economically, is a threat to your economic interests.

[00:34:15] Cameron: And therefore, could

[00:34:17] Cameron: be, could be declared a foreign adversary, seems very loose sort of an argument. Now the US, of course, is a strategic military and economic threat to every country on the planet, so I hereby announce that Australia has declared the US as a foreign adversary.

[00:34:37] Ray: Right back at ya.

[00:34:39] Cameron: now, I want to, I know people are going to be thinking this, um, Steve Sammartino says this all the time, he’s very anti China, married to a Chinese woman.

[00:34:48] Cameron: He says China already blocks many foreign media outlets, social media platforms, other websites, Facebook, Twitter, Google, you know, the BBC, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Time, New York Times are all banned in China.

[00:35:03] Ray: Mm hmm.

[00:35:04] Cameron: Uh, Reddit, Snapchat, et cetera, et cetera. They’re all banned in China. So he is always like, well, fuck China.

[00:35:11] Cameron: We can ban China. China bans Western apps. We can ban China’s apps and it’s all good. Fair enough, we can do that. But when they do that, we accuse them of censorship. It’s an autocratic, they don’t believe in freedom of speech. It’s autocratic, it’s outrageous when we do it.

[00:35:32] Ray: Yes.

[00:35:33] Cameron: do it, we go, well, it’s national security.

[00:35:37] Ray: it’s measured. It’s measured. It’s thoughtful.

[00:35:40] Cameron: when they do it, they say it’s national security. You’re trying to, you know, Western media organizations are trying to infiltrate our society. We say it’s outrageous. When they do it, we say, eh, you know, it’s fine. So there’s this thing called the code of foreign, uh, CFR. And they have a determination of foreign adversaries.

[00:36:04] Cameron: Here’s what it says. The secretary has determined that the following foreign governments or foreign non government persons have engaged in a long term pattern or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or security and safety of the United States persons and therefore constitute foreign adversaries solely for the purposes of the executive order this rule and any subsequent rule.

[00:36:29] Cameron: Here’s the list. The People’s Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Two, the Republic of Cuba. Three, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Four, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea. Five, the Russian Federation. Six, Venezuelan politician Nicolas Maduro. Just Nicolas Maduro.

[00:36:54] Cameron: The rest of Venezuela’s fine, it’s just Nicolas

[00:36:57] Ray: lovely people.

[00:36:59] Cameron: The other name, the unofficial name of this list, is the list of countries the US failed to overthrow in the last 75 years.

[00:37:06] Ray: Yeah, we don’t like that. We don’t lose

[00:37:08] Tony: ha ha.

[00:37:09] Tony: ha.

[00:37:10] Cameron: You’re now a foreign adversary. Cuba, for fuck’s sake, what? What is Cuba’s military or economic threat against the United States? Like, is it Cuban cigars? They’re trying to infiltrate the country with good tobacco? Well aged tobacco? I don’t know.

[00:37:29] Ray: That’s the best I got is the cigars. Yes.

[00:37:33] Cameron: Okay,

[00:37:33] Cameron: so

[00:37:34] Ray: don’t like to lose. Yeah.

[00:37:37] Cameron: up with. Um, number one, tech companies. I’m gonna, I’m gonna drill down into these a little bit, but tech companies. Big tech companies, particularly Meta, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, the MIC, Jewish lobbyists, and, uh, large media organizations.

[00:37:59] Cameron: And the politicians that get funded by all of the above, right? That’s who stands to benefit as five, five basic, uh, conjoined groups here, I think. Now,

[00:38:12] Ray: brokers of America. Yeah.

[00:38:14] Cameron: yeah. Um, you know, we were talking about Meta’s campaign against him before. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is often described as the world’s most valuable non public startup.

[00:38:30] Cameron: Last year it was valued at 300 billion.

[00:38:34] Tony: Oof.

[00:38:34] Cameron: publicly listed, but they plan to, they plan to IPO in China. Um, but of course, if they lose the U S market, that’s probably going to be more difficult. Uh, but if the U S if some U S organization, it’s not just Meta, there’s also the Trump’s former treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who, you know, he’s talking about putting together.

[00:39:02] Cameron: He said, he’s already got a group of investors ready to jump in and buy this. Well, yeah, of course you do.

[00:39:08] Cameron: Wow.

[00:39:08] Ray: me last week. Yeah.

[00:39:09] Cameron: Trump was trying to ban it and Trump’s former Treasury Secretary is ready to buy it.

[00:39:15] Tony: Well, Trump’s flip flopped. He’s in favor of it now. He doesn’t want ByteDance to be sold.

[00:39:20] Cameron: we will talk about that too, I’ve got stuff on that, we’ll talk about

[00:39:23] Tony: do I.

[00:39:24] Cameron: Right, so, most valuable non public startup in the world, um,

[00:39:31] Tony: you need to add, sorry, excuse me Cam, you need to add Wall Street investment bankers to your list because if ByteDance lists in China, they don’t get a taste, so they would be against it too.

[00:39:44] Cameron: yeah, good point, your Goldman Sachses, your Morgan Stanleys, all those guys. We’re going to underwrite the, but it’ll probably be a SPAC anyway. They don’t have to do a traditional IPO. It’ll just be a SPAC. Um, in terms of the threat to Meta, I looked up a number of, uh, studies on where TikTok ranks, um, in terms of social media, penetration, hours, all that kind of stuff.

[00:40:11] Cameron: Globally, they come in at number three. After Facebook and YouTube, but, uh, they, they, they sometimes appear lower down in the rankings, like number five, but that’s when the studies break out various Facebook properties. So you have Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera, which are all owned by Facebook.

[00:40:34] Cameron: So if you merge them all together, it’s number three after Facebook and YouTube. Um, it’s the fourth most popular social platform in the US, but Again, the top three are all Facebook properties. So it’s actually number two in the U S and as I said before, almost half of the population in the U S are on Facebook.

[00:40:57] Cameron: And obviously it’s a major threat to Facebook’s revenues. If it’s gobbling up. As much, uh, user minutes as it is, user attention. So, it’s a threat to Facebook, and it tends to be capturing a lot of the younger demo, which is probably a pretty big advertising demo. Facebook’s playing back well with its, it’s like, reels and that kind of stuff, but it’s got a long way to go.

[00:41:23] Tony: That’s what I was going to say. Imitations of, the fact that Facebook launched Reels suggests that they see TikTok as a threat.

[00:41:30] Cameron: Yeah! And, you know, we know basic capitalism is, if you can’t beat them, buy them or kill them, right? And they’re trying to do one or the other here. They’re trying to kill it or buy it. And I love the, the US politicians position on this. This is also in the secretary of the energy and commerce paper.

[00:41:50] Cameron: They’re like, Hey, we’re not trying to ban TikTok. Don’t come after me saying we’re trying to ban it. We’re not trying to ban it. We’re just trying to force them to sell it. It can still be around. If China doesn’t, if the ByteDance or the CCP won’t allow them to sell it, that’s on them. That’s not, that’s not about us, that’s on them.

[00:42:11] Cameron: By the way, Chinese government has said that any sale of TikTok would have to comply with their law on tech exports, exporting Chinese IP, and they may just shut it down and say no. Like the US government is preventing American companies from selling chip technology. To an AI technology to China, China can go, fuck you.

[00:42:35] Cameron: You’re not getting out TikTok. And then it just, yeah, just ceases to exist.

[00:42:41] Tony: That’s, that’s an interesting curveball. Where does the Oracle data sit then?

[00:42:45] Cameron: Yeah,