The video-sharing platform TikTok has deleted three Arabic-language accounts of RT, without explanation. The measure comes as the Israel-Hezbollah conflict has spurred fears of a regional escalation.
RT Arabic, RT Online and RT Newsroom accounts vanished on Tuesday evening. The Spanish-language Actualidad RT account has also been blocked without explanation.
They had survived last Saturday’s purge of accounts belonging to RT International, Sputnik Afrique, Sputnik Africa, Sputnik International, Sputnik Brasil, Sputnik Mundo, Sputnik Indonesia and Sputnik Serbia. TikTok has not yet commented on the latest development.
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TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which has come under intense pressure from US authorities in recent months. Under a law enacted in April, the social network could be banned if ByteDance does not sell it to a US owner within a year.
I don't get this. Why give in to pressure from the US when they've already passed a law to kick you out?
It's not like currying favor with a ban coming from an executive branch organization that can be reversed with the stroke of one person's pen, this is not something that will be reversed because it can be trivially blocked in congress.
This is not good.
I know Bytedance /=/ China or the CPC but this is exactly why the US wants control of Tiktok in the first place, to control global narratives, to ban who they want, to alter algorithms to push US state dept propaganda, this is just a few steps short of that.
And they're functionally giving it to them by going through with these bans which would seem to impact users outside the US. So at this rate they might as well sell to the US. At this rate I hope they do get forcibly shut down and removed from the US so they have no reason at all to do this kind of censorship. (I mean ideally I'd prefer they win at the SCOTUS and get to continue operating and give the US the finger on censoring global operations).
At the very least they should split operations off and make the US/NATO operations one distinct legal entity, then another entity that operates outside those regions that the west have no plausible control over which wouldn't have any reason to ban these non-western counter-narrative sources.