Tag: Chinese government

Newest TikTok Trend Has People Terrorizing Their Cats To Taylor Swift Songs

TikTok is a major security risk to the country, a danger to the people using it, and a platform that encourages animal abuse. It’s time for the US government to take action.

The cat is wide-eyed with terror, his mouth moving in protest as his human picks him up.

“Spock already hates me so why not torture him more?” reads the caption on the TikTok video as the woman spins him around to Taylor Swift’s saccharine ballad August.

In another, a man in his 40s stares into the camera, snatches his cat up in one quick motion and then cackles gleefully as he spins his cat, who squirms in his grip and meows plaintively. One woman admitted her cat “hated every second of this” as she twirled her to the Swift track.

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Cats subjected to the Taylor Swift “cat spinning” trend on TikTok.

There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of these videos on TikTok, the Chinese government-controlled social media platform. Inexplicable as the trend is, it’s far from the first time people have abused and terrorized their cats for “lulz” and the approval of strangers on TikTok.

@mikamadii

Spock already hates me so why not torture him more #august #taylorswift #cat #augustcat #taylor #folklore #spin #fyp #trend

♬ original sound – Mikaela Bisson

Previous trends had TikTok users picking their cats up upside-down and one-handed, then “answering” them as if they were telephones while reciting a line from the movie The Princess Diaries.

The 2021 holiday season saw the invention and propagation of a “hack” by someone who claimed that if you chase your cat around and brandish your Christmas tree like a weapon so the cat thinks you’re going to hit her with it, “it’ll be too scared to f**k with” the tree. Classy. The video of the woman terrorizing her cat piled up more than 25 million views and spawned innumerable imitators.

Then there was the “influencer” who smacked his cat around and uploaded footage of it, not by accident but because he says that’s how people properly “discipline” their pets. There are one-off abuse videos, and then there are trends that just won’t die, like the “prank” in which people frighten their cats half to death by placing cucumbers behind them while they’re eating.

TikTok is legitimately evil

More than any other platform, aided by an insidious algorithm that expertly keeps its users glued to the screen and scrolling, TikTok is a vehicle for social contagion, elevating the crass, the outrageous and the destructive as it lavishes clicks and revenue on people who behave abominably.

Just look at the case of Chloe Mitchell, the popular TikToker who nearly destroyed a non-profit animal shelter single-handedly when she threw a tantrum earlier this year. Mitchell enjoyed in excess of 50 million views on videos in which she invented wild stories painting the shelter as some sort of criminal operation run by “scammers” who, she claimed, enrich themselves by adopting out animals.

It would almost be funny for its absurdity if not for the fact that the shelter’s operations were crippled for two months as Mitchell’s followers called in death threats, review-bombed the shelter to ruin its reputation online and made its volunteers fear for their safety.

A major security risk

It baffles me why anyone would continue to use TikTok — or sign up to use it in the first place — when its operators admitted under oath that sensitive data belonging to American users is routinely accessed by the company’s headquarters in Beijing, despite many public assurances that the data was compartmentalized and available only to software engineers in TikTok’s US offices.

The company was also caught spying on journalists and is the subject of a Department of Justice investigation into its misuse of user data.

And if that isn’t reason enough for some people to uninstall the app, consider the fact that TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, added code that makes the app an extremely malicious piece of spyware software capable of capturing every tap or keystroke by its users.

For those who aren’t well-versed in technical matters, this means having the app on any of your devices is tantamount to handing China’s government the keys to all of your online accounts, including banking and credit, as well as all your text, email and in-app correspondence. ByteDance can read the private texts you exchange with family members, see precisely what you’re doing on sites like Facebook and Youtube, and help itself to users’ most private information.

Some people might not understand the scope of the security risk because they may not know that every organization in China is subservient and ultimately accountable to the Chinese government and the communist party. The communist government can access data from Chinese companies at any time, force them to hand over their proprietary technology and research, and compel them to cooperate with cyber attacks on US citizens and infrastructure. In fact, it’s written into Chinese law. The government has total control over every Chinese corporation and, under President Xi Jinping, has tightened its grip on every layer of society.

It’s not difficult to imagine the Chinese government using the wealth of data collected by TikTok to compromise the devices of people who work on critical US infrastructure, like the power grid or defense systems, and use that access to retrieve their employee login credentials, providing access to the systems they work on.

Imagine cyberattacks that shut down power plants in Texas and across the southern US during severe weather like the deadly heat dome the country experienced this summer. Or Chinese government-sponsored hackers crippling US banking systems, leaving Americans without access to currency for days or weeks.

Then there are the “smaller” risks that are devastating on an individual level: A hacker compromises your devices and locks photographs of deceased loved ones that are priceless to you, or threatens to blast details about your private life to everyone in your contact list if you don’t pay them $10,000 in cryptocurrency.

Or maybe your information isn’t used in any particularly dramatic way, but in the aggregate becomes part of the great data pool the Chinese government uses to build and refine the most invasive social surveillance system in human history.

All that to use an app that promotes videos of people abusing their pets? No thanks. I hope the US government comes to its senses and bans the app from the US entirely before something catastrophic happens because if they don’t, it’s not a matter of if something disastrous will happen, but when.

TikTok’s Latest Viral Trend Is Popping Cat Pimples: Can We Ban This App Already?

Each viral trend on the app is more grotesque than the last.

I’m all out of withering sarcasm, so I’ll just say it: The newest trend on TikTok involves close-up videos showing people popping their Sphynx cats’ pimples.

The PewDiePie of the craze, if you will, is one @Sphynx.cleaner, whose videos show a woman’s carefully manicured hands holding a defeated-looking Sphynx cat and popping its pimples between her formidable fingernails.

Tens of millions of people have watched her videos of puss pimple-popping, not including the millions of other views accumulated by lesser practitioners of the grotesque genre.

Sphynx cats lack fur and have skin often compared to chamois leather. Fur helps cats absorb and redistribute naturally-occurring oils secreted by the skin, so felines of the Sphynx breed are much more susceptible to acne problems than typical short- and long-haired cats. Without fur to help redistribute them, the skin oils can create a “film” that clogs pores, according to Jessica Taylor, a veterinarian in North Carolina.

Sphynx pimples
Uh, no. Credit: Sphynx.cleaner/TikTok

Not surprisingly, popping a cat’s pimples makes things worse and is not pleasant for the kitty.

“These lesions indicate a disruption in the skin and skin barrier, and squeezing or poking them can introduce bacteria, potentially worsening the lesion, causing pain and infection,” Taylor told Newsweek. “If the lesion is already infected, handling it could spread bacteria to the pet parent.”

As for TikTok, this is not the first time one of the app’s trends has been detrimental to the health and safety of felines, although most of its inanity is focused on humans. I suppose you can view it as some sort of advanced Darwinian engine, accelerating the self-removal of human beings from the gene pool. Among the trends that have gone viral on the app:

  • People who use self-tanning bottles as nasal spray out of some misguided belief that ingesting the stuff will not only achieve the desired effect, but somehow lead to a more even, natural-looking distribution of tanner. It reminds me of former President Donald Trump’s impromptu suggestion, during a national press conference, that ingesting hand sanitizer could be a “tremendous” way to stop COVID.
  • Videos instructing women to eat the tablets inside Clearblue pregnancy tests as a “contraceptive hack,” claiming the tablets — which are designed to absorb urine during the chemical test — are actually morning after pills.
  • People ingesting methylene blue — an anti-fungal fish tank cleaner — because “fitness influencers” say it can “cure” COVID-19, boost metabolism and slow the aging process. Think of the triumph of critical thinking here: These are people who won’t get a vaccine that’s been through three-stages of trials before getting FDA approval, and whose efficacy and safety have been the subjects of rigorous peer review, but they’re willing to drink a chemical manufactured and sold as a cleaning solution for fish tanks.
  • The so-called Nyquil Challenge, in which people use Nyquil instead of cooking oil to cook chicken in a frying pan.
  • Period blood face masks, which are self-explanatory. Another grotesque and potentially dangerous trend started by “influencers” who claim some sort of nebulous expertise and know that “hacks” will net them attention and clicks. The more outrageous, the better.
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“Did you know that urinal cakes are made by Carvel? It’s true! They’re deliciously chocolatey, with just a hint of vanilla, cinnamon and industrial strength anti-bacterial. Mmmmmm!”

Of course, we’ve known for years that Chinese companies are beholden to the Chinese government according to Chinese law, which means the government — and the communist party — can help itself to TikTok user data whenever it wants.

After TikTok’s US-based executives insisted to congress that American users’ data is firewalled and cannot be accessed by the company’s employees in China — and, by extension, the Chinese government — a series of leaks confirmed that China’s government was in fact regularly accessing that data. Absolutely no one, except maybe the politicians who think the internet is a “series of tubes,” were surprised by this revelation.

China’s government can use the data to track journalists, exploit American and European users, program its algorithm to shuffle them toward harmful content, censor content the Chinese government doesn’t like, and even coerce individuals by threatening to release information on their viewing habits.

So can we evacuate TikTok’s US headquarters already, raze it to the ground, and ban the app from every mobile store?

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“Mr. Darwin! Mr. Darwin let him go! Magnifico!”

Chinese Government to Citizens: ‘Deal With’ Your Pets, Or We Will

Chinese authorities threaten pets as Coronavirus fears grow.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a government with no respect for any kind of life — human or animal — would threaten the mass extermination of cats and dogs.

It’s par for the course in China, where authorities in dozens of cities and provinces are urging people to “deal with” their pets in the wake of the Coronavirus threat — or the government will, media reports say.

The warnings have been issued in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Coronavirus, as well as Shanxi, Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong, Hebei and Shanghai, according to the Humane Society International.

Yet there’s no evidence the virus has been transmitted by domesticated pets like cats and dogs, and no evidence those animals can catch it from humans, experts say.

In Wuhan, residents have been told to keep their pets indoors, and warned that any cats or dogs spotted outdoors will be “killed and buried on the spot,” the UK’s Metro reported.

But experts say it’s the government’s fault that the virus jumped from wild animals to humans in the first place. China has refused to shut down so-called “wet markets,” where live animals are sold next to the carcasses of recently-slaughtered animals, despite the fact that SARS and other viruses originated from those markets.

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A Chinese wet market. Credit: Nikkei

Officials believe the Coronavirus originated at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, one of many “wet markets” described as “filthy, crowded places where animals are displayed alive in small cages” and “are often slaughtered on site.”

China has been “mired in long-held beliefs about the benefits of eating exotic and often endangered animals for good health,” the Humane Society said in a statement, referring to traditional Chinese “medicine” and other folk practices that use animal parts in ineffective and dangerous tonics and elixirs.

In addition to creating the circumstances for viruses to jump from wild animals to humans, the illegal wildlife trade has pushed animals like tigers and pangolins to the brink of extinction.

“Chinese society is boiling with anger at wildlife policy failures,” said the Humane Society International’s China policy specialist, Peter Li. “Social media is full of posts condemning the refusal to shut down the wildlife markets. This is the worst Chinese New Year in China’s recent history.”