SAUL LOEB / Donald Trump / TikTok
It’s no secret that TikTok hasn’t truly been the same since Donald Trump “saved” it, but new details reveal how the social media platform got a slap on the wrist from Orange Mussolini’s DOJ.
Spotted on Raw Story, the DOJ’s $400 million settlement with TikTok to hold the popular social media platform responsible for its negative impact on young children turned out to be a “sweetheart deal” that let TikTok avoid properly addressing child-safety claims and more.
According to the website, TikTok cleared up child-safety features it publicly discussed, left a federal monitoring requirement unaddressed, and ignored “a far more alarming allegation that never made it into the case” about your personal data.
Per Raw Story:
A former Federal Trade Commission official told the New York Post that investigators had uncovered evidence TikTok exposed American users’ personal data, including Social Security and bank account numbers, on an internal messaging system accessible to employees in China.
“We knew that China-based employees accessed information contained within this messaging service that included American users’ personally identifiable information,” the former official said. But that finding never appeared in the DOJ’s lawsuit, which focused instead on accounts belonging to children under 13.
Also revealed, of the $400 million settlement, $300 million of it went to resolve child-privacy claims themselves while $100 million went to vacating a 2019 order requiring TikTok to submit to independent monitoring of its data practices, one of the more important provisions that TikTok was able to sidestep.
This just adds to ill feeling towards TikTok since it went under Trump’s homey, Larry Ellison’s Oracle’s and other investors’ control while ByteDance keeps a 19.9 percent stake.
Users also couldn’t help but notice a lot more MAGA content being pushed, with Trump himself even boasting about how popular he is on the platform.
Welp. TikTok is officially home for the ops.