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CEO of German Publisher Calls for TikTok to Be Banned in ‘Every Country’

© AP Photo / Kiichiro SatoA logo of a smartphone app TikTok is seen on a user post on a smartphone screen Monday, Sept. 28, 2020, in Tokyo
A logo of a smartphone app TikTok is seen on a user post on a smartphone screen Monday, Sept. 28, 2020, in Tokyo - Sputnik International, 1920, 08.09.2022
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The head of Axel Springer, which demands employees uphold the “right of existence of the state of Israel,” has insisted that the popular app featuring videos of dancing teenagers is “of course a tool of espionage.”
The head of German publisher Axel Springer is calling for popular video-based social media app TikTok to be banned across the world.
“TikTok should be banned in every country,” Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner reportedly told audiences at the recent Vox Media Code Conference in Los Angeles. “We have at the moment a naïveté with dealing with China,” Döpfner claimed, insisting that currently “we hand over personal data to the Chinese government.”
Western officials and social media executives have grumbled over the fast-growing app for years, with Facebook parent company Meta* going as far as paying a political consulting firm to smear TikTok as a threat to children.
Conjecture by US intelligence figures that TikTok’s user data was being handed over to the Chinese government led to a 2020 executive order by former President Donald Trump declaring TikTok a “threat” to “national security.”
Trump demanded that the site be banned if it wasn’t sold by its Chinese owners, but the order was ultimately held up in the courts and later overturned by the Biden administration – though last month Brendan Carr, a commissioner for the Federal Communication Commission, also called TikTok a “threat to national security” and called on tech giants Google and Apple to ban the app.
A logo of a smartphone app TikTok is seen on a user post on a smartphone screen Monday, Sept. 28, 2020, in Tokyo.  - Sputnik International, 1920, 20.08.2022
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Likewise, both Axel Springer – which owns media heavyweights like Business Insider and Politico Europe – and its outspoken chief executive have a troubling history of attempting to marginalize or silence those who don’t adhere to their pro-Western worldview.
Last year, Döpfner sparked outrage internationally by urging employees to quit if they were uncomfortable with the media company raising the Israeli flag outside its office amid the Zionist government’s deadly assault on Gaza which left over 100 Palestinian civilians dead.
Workers outside the US are required to sign a statement saying they’ll comply with what the official Axel Springer website describes as the company’s “values” – i.e., “support [for] the Jewish people and the right of existence of the state of Israel,… the transatlantic alliance between the United States of America and Europe… [and] the principles of a free market economy.”
*Meta is a company banned in Russia.
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