Free Republic

TikTok's parent company is required to share data with the Chinese government The Chinese parent company of TikTok had access to American users' data for months even while U.S. employees did not have access themselves, according to leaked audio. The audio, obtained by BuzzFeed News, covers more than 80 internal meetings at TikTok between the months of September 2021 and January 2022. It showed that U.S. employees were not permitted to access user data and instead relied on Chinese employees to do so, according to BuzzFeed. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is required under Chinese law to share its data with...

For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in the United States is stored in the United States, rather than China, where ByteDance, the video platform's parent company, is located. But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users — exactly the type of behavior that inspired former president Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States. The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok...

This cat has purr-sonality in the form of the mysterious masked crusader. One of Indraini Wahyudin Noor’s many cats — this one cryptically named “Boy” — is going viral for bearing an uncanny resemblance to Zorro. The nine-month-old Persian kitten has a distinct black patch surrounding both eyes that looks just like the iconic mask of the hero created by American “pulp” writer Johnston McCulley in 1919. He isn’t too different from a regular cat, as Noor says, “he always wants to be petted, cuddled and held. He likes to play a lot, but he hates being bathed each week.”...

Searches for Sapir Nahum - the Arab [Muslim, ex] spouse in custody Former spouse, nationalist and criminal offender, "Tiktok star" who published videos about Jewish women who (allegedly, he claims) "converted" [sic] to Islam and took part in the riots in Acre during the "5781 [2021] riots" Shalom Friedman, 7 Sivan 5782 - 06/06/2022 Police are conducting extensive searches for Sapir Nahum, who disappeared about 4 days ago, and suspect that her Arab partner is involved in her disappearance. Sapir Nahum (24), a mother of two children from Acre, disappeared last Thursday after she was reportedly seen getting in the...

A 99-year-old World War II veteran who became a viral TikTok star while opening up about his wartime experiences has made an emotional return to Normandy in order to honor the thousands of his fellow soldiers who died on D-Day. Jake Larson joined the National Guard when he was only 15 years old - more than 80 years ago - and participated on the June 6, 1944, battle on Normandy beach in France which saw the 'land, air, and sea forces' come together for the 'largest invasion in human history' according to EisenhowerLibrary.gov - also known as D-Day. Now, the...

Salvador Ramos was named as the 18-year-old high school student and fast-food worker who stormed into classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, gunning down at least 19 students and two fourth-grade teachers on May 24, 2022. It was the nation’s deadliest elementary school shooting since the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. The suspect, who flashed pictures of guns on Instagram, shot his grandmother before entering the school pursued by law enforcement officers, the Associated Press reported. The Uvalde High School student shot children in grades 2 to 4 and two beloved fourth-grade teachers, Irma Garcia...

State Farm quickly distanced itself from a program that pushed books about gender fluidity on young children Monday after a new ad campaign slammed the insurance giant as "a creepy neighbor," but Consumers' Research thinks the insurance giant still has to "undo the damage" it caused. "Yesterday we launched our ad campaign calling out State Farm for donating books aimed at kindergartners on the topics of transgenderism and being non-binary… now they claim that they have ended their partnership with the GenderCool Project," Consumers' Research executive director Will Hild told Fox News Digital, calling the turn of events "an indication...

The family of a 10-year-old girl who choked herself to death as part of a TikTok challenge is suing the video platform for negligence and having a 'defective design.' Nylah Anderson of Philadelphia was found unconscious in her mom's bedroom closet on December 7. She hung herself from a purse strap after seeing videos related to the 'blackout challenge' on the app's 'For You' page, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Pennsylvania. The challenge encourages users to asphyxiate themselves, pass out and regain consciousness on camera. Nylah's mother Tawainna says the company is to blame for...

Supreme Court justices have faced harassment and intimidation after a pro-abortion group calling itself Ruth Sent Us posted a map to their homes. Justice Alito and his family, who wrote the draft opinion on abortion that had been leaked by leftists, have had to go into hiding at an undisclosed location. Had conservative protests outside the homes of Sotomayor and Kagan led one of them to go into hiding, the FBI would already be on the case and the media would be calling it an insurrection and a threat to democracy, but it’s not political terrorism when leftists do it....

SNIP TikTok, as we know it today, is only a few years old. But its growth is like nothing we’ve seen before. In 2021, it had more active users than Twitter, more U.S. watch minutes than YouTube, more app downloads than Facebook, more site visits than Google. The app is best known for viral dance trends, but there was a time when Twitter was 140-character updates about lunch orders and Facebook was restricted to elite universities. Things change. Perhaps they have already changed. A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked...

Do a quick scan of TikTok and you’ll find trendy young people casually blowing hundreds or thousands of dollars on clothes and jewelry, often set to the clattering, bass-boosted din of Florida rapper Saucy Santana’s fittingly titled “Material Girl.” Plenty of those influencers get the goods they flaunt for free. But if you don’t have the followers, or the up-front cash to blow, TikTokers have a tip: Just use “buy now, pay later” services, the hottest new way to take on debt. You may have seen some of these names — Klarna, Sezzle, Zip (formerly Quadpay), Afterpay and Affirm —...

Natalie Winters: Texas Lab Agreed to Destroy Records If Asked by Wuhan Institute of Virology American Thought Leaders AMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS JAN JEKIELEK “I had never seen a clause like this, and it basically stipulated that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could demand that the Galveston National Laboratory—again, a taxpayer-funded U.S.-based lab—would have to delete files, pathogens, materials.” National Pulse investigative reporter Natalie Winters recently broke the story of the Galveston National Laboratory’s memorandum of understanding with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We discuss her extensive research into Chinese Communist Party influence in America, from TikTok to compromised “fact-checkers” to...

St Petersburg outfit hijacks discussions on Twitter, TikTok, world leaders’ social accounts and media websites, as well as manipulating opinion polls ...Online operatives were found to be ordering followers to target western media outlets and politicians The headquarters is allegedly located in rented space in St Petersburg’s Arsenal Machine-building Factory, a company that manufactures military equipment and technology. The study details how the Russian president’s regime is trying to manipulate public opinion on social media, as well as in the comments sections of major media outlets. Targets include the social media accounts of Boris Johnson, the British prime minister; the...

President Joe Biden’s new disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz used TikTok to imitate her male trolls. In a video created on January 25, Jankowicz dressed up and imitated two of her online male critics. Jankowicz made her TikTok video account private after it was featured on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show Thursday night, but some videos still exist on her Twitter account. “Women should not be involved in government. They can not be trusted,” she said as she wore a hat and looked into the camera, speaking in a male tone. “The real reason she is angry is no Chads would...

Russian sanctions on Big Tech companies are an increasingly regular event, particularly with regard to companies' promotion of LGBT ideology.(LifeSiteNews) – In what has become a regular occurrence, a Russian court has fined social media companies Meta and TikTok for posts that promoted LGBT ideology. News outlets reported April 26 that Meta – the parent company of both Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – had been fined four million rubles ($53,000) by a Moscow court. The Tagansky Moscow Court reportedly levied the fine over the company’s refusal to remove posts from Instagram which promoted “non-traditional sexual values to minors.” Meanwhile, Chinese-owned...

Truth Social is currently beating Twitter & TikTok on the Apple Store pic.twitter.com/RxawVUAYKH— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2022

The woman, known as Katie Grace Jacobs (@katiegracejacobs) shared the video as a stitch to another TikToker's (@oliviachow69) advice. The latter TikToker shared a viral video advising people of color, especially women, to refuse to move for white people when walking and see how many of them move out of the way. Jacobs decided to try it, saying she'd never noticed that many white people don't move for others. In her video, she covers her mouth, then gasps and laughs. The TikToker walks down a sidewalk and has to navigate between other people who refused to move for her. She...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a press conference on Saturday he is hoping Asian countries will “change their attitude” towards Ukraine as European countries have done. Zelensky said that NATO not accepting Ukraine as a member was a “gross mistake” and that some of the alliance’s European member states had underestimated the country. He added, however, that Ukraine’s “unity” and “strength” in response to Russia’s invasion “managed to change the attitude of the alliance and the European member states” toward the country.

Yes, it doxed her and it deserves legal and economic consequences, but there may be an unexpected benefit to the WaPo’s unprincipled, dangerous conduct. The Washington Post attacked Libs of TikTok (“LOTT”), not because it wants to debate the merits of the leftist-made videos the Twitter account exposes to a wider audience, but because it wants to silence anonytmous woman who runs it. Ironically, in a new form of the Streisand effect, the Washington Post seems to have exposed LOTT’s material to literally hundreds of thousands more people. The current saga of LOTT can be summed up quickly. LOTT locates...

In a statement penned Tuesday, Washington Post senior managing editor Cameron Barr stepped up to defend hypocritical malefactor Taylor Lorenz after she doxed the owner of the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, including her identity and address, all because she exposed the lunatics, groomers, and general extremists of the left. And rightfully, there was a great public outcry against the paper. Laughably calling Lorenz an “accomplished and diligent journalist,” Barr said her “reporting methods comport entirely with The Washington Post’s professional standards.” But in the rest of the statement, Barr spewed lies to cover for Lorenz’s disgusting style of muckraking....