Tom Tugendhat’s war on TikTok

As the Tory leadership race heats up, all six candidates are trying to draw dividing lines to stand out to their fellow MPs – and the membership. Now Tom Tugendhat has taken to Twitter to make clear his stance on the all-important issue of, um, TikTok. The China hawk has slammed the Beijing-based social media platform, telling his Twitter followers that ‘unlike other candidates, you won’t have seen my videos on TikTok’. The app, Tugendhat says, is ‘controlled by a foreign country’ that ‘doesn’t share any of our values and in fact silences debate’. Don’t hold back…

The Conservative leadership contender continued his tirade:

TikTok is owned by a company called ByteDance, which is headquartered in China. That means the code, the algorithm, that decides what you see and perhaps more importantly what you don’t, is written by people who are under the control of the Chinese Communist Party… We’ve seen huge problems with human rights in that country… I’m not going to do anything that encourages people to use a news source that is controlled by a foreign country and one in particular that doesn’t share any of our values and in fact silences debate.