Bipartisanship at its best (or worst): The ban and the blather
www.workers.org
As much as Democrats and Republicans try to appear different from one another, sometimes they can’t help sounding alike.  This was obvious in the 352-65 vote in the House of Representatives to compel Chinese internet company ByteDance to sell the social media platform TikTok — or be banned in the

Numerous House representatives on both sides of the aisle made similar statements. President Joe Biden says he will sign the bill if it passes in the Senate.

But the facts don’t square with the anti-communist rhetoric of these sound-alike capitalist politicians. TikTok is not owned, in whole or in part, by the Communist Party of China. The Chinese government only recently acquired a 1% stake in the company.

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The real beneficiaries of a ban would be TikTok’s U.S.-based competitors like Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

What might have been a hidden motive behind the House vote became not so hidden when Rep. Ted Cruz blurted out that TikTok was “promoting to kids self-harm videos and anti-Israel propaganda.” The platform has been used to further solidarity with Palestine and build pro-Palestine demonstrations. Meta has blocked hundreds of pro-Palestine postings, according to Human Rights Watch — hardly an anti-imperialist organization. (aljazeera.com Dec. 21)

Whatever the true motive for this purportedly anti-communist crusade, it’s clear that working-class and oppressed people should not be bamboozled into getting behind it. Not that that’s likely to happen. More and more of us are realizing that our fight is against capitalist exploitation, [neo]imperialism and Zionism, struggling alongside the heroic people of Palestine.