‘Happy to provide additional basic facts to you or your staff that I learned in elementary school. Ask anytime,’ California Democrat tells Tom Cotton
Tom Cotton is facing widespread criticism after he asked Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew if had “ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party”.
The Arkansas Republican senator pursued the much-ridiculed line of questioning during a Senate hearing on child safety on social media on Wednesday, which was attended by a number of big tech CEOs such as Mr Chew.
“You said today, as you often say, that you live in Singapore – of what nation are you a citizen?” Mr Cotton asked.
“Singapore,” the CEO responded.
…
“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?” Mr Cotton then asked.
“Senator, I’m Singaporean – no,” Mr Chew responded.
Unable to let the matter go, Mr Cotton asked: “Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?”
“No, senator, again, I’m Singaporean,” the tech CEO said.
To be fair, Cotton is an utter dipshit so his ignorance is genuine.
Are we sure that his name is actually Cotton? Like maybe someone asked once, and he had to check the back of his underwear?
I read this whole event picturing Cotton from King of the Hill.
Hey George glassed himself
tbf, if the guy was a Chinese communist, it’d have to be secret, I guess.
Is this projection? Why hasn’t Cotton denied being a member of the CCP, is there something he’s hiding? He sure claims to know quite a lot about what’s going on behind the scenes in China, maybe somebody should check this out
Plot twist: turns out Cotton is really a founding member of the ICP.
He has no working knowledge of what he refers to as “sticky metal” or magnets.
I really wanted Shou to ask Cotton if he was affiliated with Russia.
It was pretty fucking stupid to ask him those questions. In addition, being a member of the CCP isn’t as big of a deal as this senator is making it out to be. We aren’t living in McCarthyism are we? Are we afraid of ideas?
America is afraid of ideas though. We have a long history of banning ideas from within our borders. By way of example, ideological restrictions on naturalization. We basically didn’t allow people to become citizens if they believed in communism as a valid government structure.
If the CEO of TikTok was born in China and moved to Singapore (or America for that matter), does that preclude him from doing business with America? Why? Are we so insecure as a nation that we must ban an entire country from our internet activity?
I’ll be the first to admit that TikTok - and apps like it - are security vulnerabilities. However, this entire debate has nothing to do with national security. If it were, Meta or X would also be under fire for selling advertising/user data to foreign countries, no? Plenty of these social media companies have entire sectors of their organization providing APIs and SAAS solutions for consuming data. Twitter has something which is essentially a firehose of all tweets being posted in any country that match a search query of yours. Is that not a security risk? It comes with geo information, timestamps, hashtags, urls, etc.
If this is about security, focus on user protections. The EU has shown a lot of promise in this area. I was the first to say “you can’t moderate the internet”, but they’ve done it. If you’ve ever been to a country within the EU in the past 5 years, you’ll notice those “accept/deny cookie” popups are far less spammy and easier to deny. In addition, most companies I’ve worked for in America have adhered to GDPR standards.
I believe we should protect locations, names, birthdays, emails, phone numbers, addresses, etc. Data should be opt-in and not opt-out. Is this hard to mandate? Yes. Of course there are going to be bad actors. But laws should not be written to catch all criminals. They should be written to promote what our society values. Do we value privacy or not?
I’d be far more impressed with a senator questioning tech companies about their data protections and their willingness to agree to not sell user data. But I somehow doubt that’s going to happen in our Congress.
“oh yeah Singapore, I get that Singapore Mei fun at the Chinese restaurant all the time, what part of China is Singapore again?”
I’ll play devil’s advocate. Being Singaporean doesn’t preclude him from having ties to the CCP. Trump is American but clearly has many ties to Russian politics. Whether any of that matters is another question, but the way the article framed this interaction was stupid.
I would pay a handsome sum to watch Tom Cotton attempt to point to Singapore on a map
<points to China>
I’m not even certain he’d be able to point to China on an unlabeled map.
I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn he wasn’t and isn’t aware that Singapore is a sovereign nation separate from China. Most of my family is unaware of that fact and we’re also from the Midwest
I’m guessing he’s mixing it up with Hong Kong, where one could plausibly ask if someone was a member of the CCP. Insane to double down on it though.
I swear he doesn’t represent all of us down here
“Ah yes, Singapore. Now exactly where in China is that located?”
Probably just the typical racial profiling from the GOP.
