A news app now owned by the Chinese tech giant TikTok’s parent company runs condition to censor ‘Tibet’ and ‘Dalai Lama’. An English language news app is running at the behest of the Chinese government to censor words not pleasant to them. A recent report reveals that the long running censorship has been acquired by the Chinese tech giant.
The popular English language news app called News Republic filtered tens of thousands of news stories every day to weed out slang and offensive language, but were told to add phrases like “freedom of the press”, “Tibet” and “Dalai Lama” by the then owner Chetah Mobile according to the report by The Telegraph on Monday.
Founded in France, where News Republic still operates, was bought in 2014 by Cheetah Mobile, a Chinese software giant, after winning a bidding war against Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company. Bytedance eventually bought News Republic for a reported $86m in 2017, according to the report.
Chinese companies are required to oblige to its government policies. Such obligations include providing snooping opportunities upon the world wide user data, imposition of censorship algorithms upon politically sensitive topics. With such abusive policies unfurling, many of Chinese digital products are under scan across the world. India is the best example since it openly banned more than a 100 Chinese apps while many of government contracts with Chinese companies are being reviewed.
Following TikTok’s ban in India, President Donald Trump has announced that US will soon follow the suit.
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