On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher argued that it’s naive to think China isn’t using TikTok for propaganda and data-gathering purposes given all of the evil things China already does.
After his panel mentioned how TikTok can be used for propaganda purposes, Maher stated, “Well, it’s also about what they’re getting, the data that they’re stealing that they’re able to look at everything that somebody is doing on TikTok. Now, I don’t know if they’re going to get a lot of information from our kids because our kids don’t know anything. But there is a lot of information to be gleaned. And just, in general, I know this is the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War and the naivete that we had with Iran taking over that country, it just makes me think about this, just in broad strokes, to not be naive about China. … Are they doing it? Of course, they’re doing it, because they’re the country that puts the Uyghurs in camps, they’re the country that locks you in your apartment if you had COVID, they did crazy things. It’s a president for life, it’s a surveillance state.”
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