In a Tuesday episode of the This Past Weekend podcast, Von dismissed any national security concerns being floated about the China-owned TikTok platform, arguing the prevalence of content related to Israel’s bombing of Gaza — where thousands of civilians have been killed — is the real reason the government is uncomfortable.
“I believe that they don’t want people sharing the truth about the genocide in Palestine and that’s why they’re doing it. I believe that that’s what it is and TikTok is one of those places where people can still do that. And they want to own it. They want to own it, dude,” the podcaster and comedian said.
Speaking as someone with no social media (big grain of salt), whenever I’ve heard reporting on people seeing the genocide on their phones it was always referencing tiktok. They never said “people watched children be exploded on twitter or Insta”. That could be due to user preference or whatever, but as an outsider, I have the ambient notion that more of this kind of content was coming from tiktok.
More concretely, in a lot of the stuff that came out of the twitter files, it’s clear that the US government does have, what I would classify as, inappropriate contact with american social media companies that can controle narratives. Without saying something with absolute certainty, the statement he’s making sounds pretty reasonable.
Also nothing is just one thing, there’s probably a ton going on.