With Germany's far-right AfD party soaring in opinion polls, Scholz said Germany needs TikTok. On March 1, Reuters reported on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's latest statement on the social platform TikTok.
According to Reuters, at a time when some Western politicians are suppressing TikTok on the grounds of so-called "security concerns", German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at a citizens' forum in the eastern city of Dresden on February 29 local time that he wants Germany to open an account on TikTok, and Germany is also considering this idea. Reuters commented that this shows that Scholz seems to be more worried about the strong social influence of his election opponents than about "security concerns" about TikTok.
On February 29, local time, in Dresden, Germany, Scholz sat on a tram and talked to others. Source: Foreign media.
I believe it was the right thing to do. ”
Scholz said. According to the report, German security agencies have warned against using the short app TikTok for fear that it could share data with China or be used to influence users. On March 1, a spokesman for Germany** said that the German side still needs to thoroughly check the relevant situation before opening a TikTok account. "Despite all the criticisms of TikTok, it is fundamentally a social platform that young people use quite a lot, and we have to recognize that. The spokesman said.
While mainstream politicians and parties in Germany have kept a low profile in using social ** to attract voters, other parties such as Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) have used TikTok to connect with younger voters ahead of this year's local elections, the report said. Political analyst Johannes Hilger said the AfD, which had soared to second place in public approval last year, had more than twice as many Facebook followers as the mainstream parties. "The West is in a dilemma. Hilger said that although the AfD has few seats in parliament, they are better able to attract the attention of voters on social media.
TikTok (data map) Source: foreign media.
It is worth noting that just as Scholz made the above statement on TikTok, the Biden campaign in the United States opened an account on TikTok last month, which sparked heated discussions. As previously reported, the TikTok account "Bidenhq", run by the team, released the first ** on the 11th of last month, a move that is believed to be aimed at winning votes from young voters. At the end of this paragraph, Biden was asked whether he wanted to vote for himself or Trump, to which he laughed and said "Are you kidding", and then chose himself. On the 12th of the same month, the White House responded by claiming that Biden's policy on TikTok would not change.
However, Biden's move has sparked opposition from some lawmakers in the United States. According to a Reuters report last month, 18 Republican lawmakers urged Biden to abandon his campaign's TikTok account on "the grounds of **". According to the report, these lawmakers include Mark Rubio, Jerry Moran, John Barasso, Martha Blackburn, Rick Scott and Josh Hawley, among others, who urged Biden to "delete the account and publicly acknowledge the *** threat posed by TikTok", among which Rubio is a veteran anti-China lawmaker. In the letter, the people said that Biden ignored the "** risk" posed by TikTok, declaring that "if the commander-in-chief of the three services is also using this app, how can the federal ** warn Americans about its risks?" ”
For a period of time, the United States and some congressmen have frequently used "** to talk about things and unreasonably suppress TikTok. On January 31, local time, the Senate Judiciary Committee of the United States Congress held a hearing entitled "Big Tech Companies and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis" in Washington, D.C., where the CEOs of the five social giants testified and were "tortured" by U.S. lawmakers. The topic of the hearing was supposed to be "online child sexual exploitation", but the lawmaker's question was off topic. Tom Cotton, a well-known anti-China legislator, repeatedly questioned Zhou Shouzi, the CEO of TikTok, about his nationality and other questions, to which the CEO of TikTok answered questions about nationality eight times, saying that he was a Singaporean. Regarding Tom Cotton's outrageous behavior, many netizens condemned him as "xenophobic" and "outright racist".
Previously, there was also **broke the news that Biden **asked ByteDance **tiktok, otherwise he would face a US ban. In this regard, China's spokesman Wang Wenbin said that China has always advocated that data security should not become a tool for individual countries to generalize the concept and abuse state power to unreasonably suppress enterprises in other countries. So far, the US has failed to produce evidence to prove that TikTok threatens the US to stop spreading false information on data security issues, stop unreasonably suppressing relevant companies, and provide an open, fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for companies from all over the world to invest and operate in the US.
*: Global Network.
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