DOJ Turns To Chinese Scare Tactics In TikTok Lawsuit

The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging that the social media app is illegally collecting children’s data. If they were actually concerned about data theft, they’d be suing EVERY social media website. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Link - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/technology/tiktok-doj-child-privacy.html

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against TikTok alleging that social media app is illegally collecting children's data. If they were actually concerned about the data theft, they'd be suing every social media website, ties into the last story we just did. This is the mean Chinese, we gotta do something. It's all been going on for so long, Meta, everybody's been doing exact same things, but it's easier to do when it's the Chinese, right?
Yeah. Because there you have the bad guys, and the bad guys are not some guy in a corner office down in Silicon Valley. The bad guys are over there in red China. They want to get you, they want to take your data. They want to turn us all into communists. These are all talking points, by the way, we have heard over the last few years about China.
You think there might, I mean, the Department of Justice is all over this.
Right.
They've come alive, right?
They really have. This will be one where they don't try to settle it. They want to get these SOBs. But the point is, did TikTok violate the agreement to not steal data?
Yes.
Seems pretty obvious.
They did.
Yes, they did. But you cannot, this is a selective prosecution. That is what this is.
There is no question.
The political persecution that everybody talks about. This is it because you could go after Google, you could go after Meta and Facebook. You could go after Instagram, even before Facebook bought 'em, all of these other sites, all of these apps. Amazon, of course, with the data theft, you could go on and on with pretty much any website anybody's ever visited, collecting and selling your data. And they only pick TikTok. That is it. We gotta go after them because they're an easy enemy, like you said, because we connect 'em to China. Everybody's afraid of China right now. We got this in the bag, the DOJ says.
Yeah. There's another point to this though and it's kind of real nuance. The DOJ, I'm assuming they're thinking this. Hell, I don't know what they think half the time. But if the DOJ looked at this in kind of a macro way, the discovery that takes place in this case, you understand, this discovery could go on for a long time. They could find documents, they could take depositions, they could find things that lead to far more than this. It could mean corporate espionage. It could mean international espionage. My guess, if somebody with a brain is driving this, they're using that as the vehicle. We do it all the time. We'll bring in a company and we'll say, okay, with this company, we're able to find out the bigger picture of what your industry is all about, you see. That's what we do on, think about, it's what we did on opioids. We did it on PFAS. We do it, it's a very common approach. And so the Department of Justice has an opportunity here. They want to talk about, well, there's all of this espionage going on. They should be able to find out. I mean, there's stuff that they can find out that ordinarily they would not be able to know. Now, the question is, will they do that? Ah, probably not. They'll settle. They'll settle for a little, some little bit of money. At the same time, these folks aren't killing people like Boeing did. Right? How much did they settle for Boeing?
Oh God. I forget the number off the top of my head. But it was pathetic.
It was chump change. Right. These are people who killed hundreds and hundreds of people and they took the money here. I'd be interested to know what they think the value of this is when they settle because probably they will settle it, you know.
Well, and another thing it does too, is it encourages TikTok, okay, well, with this and the legislation that they passed this year, now we've gotta sell. And that's of course, I think what the federal government wants to do. And then their wealthy Silicon Valley backers.