March 7, 2024: The TikTok Op
Chinese spy fired from Canadian lab worked on bat viruses in Wuhan; Iran’s nuclear breakout; Beware of primary sources
The Big Story
On Tuesday, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party introduced bipartisan legislation that would force TikTok, the video-based social media app that claims to have 170 million users in the United States, to sever ties with its CCP-connected Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or be banned from app stores and web hosting services in the United States. The bill, which reportedly has the “support of” the White House but has not been endorsed by it, is expected to pass a committee vote on Thursday and then move to a full vote on the House floor.
The bill grants the president authority to ban social media apps determined to be controlled by a foreign adversary as defined in Title 10 of the U.S. Code: i.e., China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. It represents the latest step in a series of stalled efforts to ban or restrict TikTok in the United States—efforts that began under the Trump administration and have continued intermittently under Biden. Although the bill’s sponsors have said that TikTok could continue to operate in the United States if it cuts its ties with ByteDance, the app posted on X on Tuesday that “this bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it.”
It’s no surprise that ByteDance would be desperate to preserve its control over the platform. Despite TikTok and ByteDance’s repeated assurances that the U.S. version of TikTok is walled off from CCP influence, there is ample reason to believe that the app is being used to spy on Americans and as a tool for CCP influence operations. For one thing, it’s the law in China: The country’s 2017 National Intelligence Law “requires all organizations and citizens to ‘support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence work’ and to refrain from disclosing their cooperation with national authorities,” according to a September 2023 U.S. State Department report on Chinese influence operations. That same report found that “as of late 2020, ByteDance maintained a regularly updated internal list identifying people who were likely blocked or restricted from all ByteDance platforms, including TikTok, for reasons such as advocating Uyghur independence.”
But Chinese influence likely extends beyond blacklists to direct manipulation of TikTok’s algorithm. A December 2023 study from the Network Contagion Research Institute found that TikTok suppressed not only content that was directly critical of the Chinese government, such as videos related to the Hong Kong protests or the oppression of the Uyghurs, but also content counter to China’s geopolitical interests, such as pro-Ukraine and pro-Israel videos. “Whether content is promoted or muted on TikTok appears to depend on whether it is aligned or opposed to the interests of the Chinese Government,” the study concluded.
Similar results were yielded by a December experiment in which Wall Street Journal reporters created eight TikTok bot accounts posing as 13-year-old Americans. Seven of the bots ultimately fell into “rabbit holes” related to the Gaza war; of the thousands of war-related videos served to these bots, 59% were pro-Palestinian, while not even 15% were pro-Israel:
The WSJ also noted that its bots were fed more than 90 videos from a single pro-Palestinian account that linked to a Qatar-based charity’s fundraising page for Gaza.
Plentiful evidence from former TikTok and ByteDance employees, moreover, shows that the Beijing-based company continues to access U.S. user data and exert control over the app, including the content that American users see. For instance, ex-employees at another ByteDance app, the now-defunct news aggregator TopBuzz, told BuzzFeed reporter Emily Baker-White in 2022 that they were instructed by ByteDance to “pin” pro-Chinese messaging at the top of the app, and that the app’s content-review system would flag for removal reporting on the Chinese government, coverage of the Hong Kong protests, and articles that mentioned Xi Jinping. Baker-White (now at Forbes) also reported, citing leaked internal conversations, that China-based ByteDance employees were continuing to access sensitive U.S. user data amid TikTok’s much-publicized attempt to silo American data in order to avoid U.S. regulatory scrutiny. Also in 2022, Baker-White revealed that at least five senior employees hired to lead departments at TikTok had resigned after discovering that they were expected to report directly to ByteDance leadership in China—despite TikTok’s public attempts to downplay ByteDance’s influence over the company.
We stress that it was Baker-White, specifically, who broke all these stories, because Baker-White reported in 2022 that China-based ByteDance employees had used TikTok to spy on her and other U.S.-based journalists covering the company. ByteDance employees in Beijing improperly gained access to the U.S. journalists’ IP addresses and user data, tracking their locations to see who they were meeting with in an effort to identify their sources within the company. When the story first broke, ByteDance and TikTok not only denied that the spying had taken place but also claimed that it was technically impossible for ByteDance employees to monitor U.S. users due to TikTok’s data security provisions. ByteDance later admitted that it had spied on journalists through TikTok in exactly the way the article had reported, but blamed the spying on rogue employees. Those same “rogue employees,” who led ByteDance’s internal audit team, had also spied on the TikTok executive responsible for limiting Chinese access to U.S. user data. He left the company in 2022.
On Thursday, TikTok reportedly went on offense against the bill, showing its users a page claiming that Congress was planning a “total ban of TikTok” that would strip “170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression” and prompting them with the phone numbers of members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which is set to vote on the bill today. According to Politico reporter Olivia Beavers, one caller told a House GOP office, “if you ban TikTok, I will kill myself”—apparently now the preferred form of protest for victims of Chinese propaganda.
Read more here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/22/tiktok-tracks-forbes-journalists-bytedance/?sh=2dee001b7da5
IN THE BACK PAGES: Wharton Professor of Statistics and Data Science Andrew Wyner explains that the Gaza Health Ministry casualty counts are fake—and the evidence is in their own data
The Rest
→A Chinese scientist who was fired from Canada’s highest-security pathogen research laboratory in 2021 for passing confidential scientific information to Chinese institutions, including mailing live strains of the Ebola virus to China, was also hired to lead the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “animal infection” project alongside so-called bat woman Shi Zhengli from June 2019 to May 2021, according to a Canadian intelligence report and reporting from Substack “The Bureau.” Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were dismissed from the Winnipeg National Microbiology Laboratory in 2019 and fired in 2021, but the details surrounding their dismissal were largely unknown until last week’s release of an unredacted report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which found that Qiu, a covert participant in the Chinese government-backed Thousand Talents Program, was passing confidential pathogen research to Chinese institutions, including the WIV.
By comparing the details in the CSIS report to open-source records, Sam Cooper of “The Bureau” reports that Qiu, shortly before she was scheduled to lead a “synthetic bat filovirus” project at WIV that would “use reverse genetics in order to create synthetic virus strains,” met at a WIV symposium with American researcher Ralph Baric and British virologist Peter Daszak, along with Zhengli. As we reported in our Jan. 23 Big Story, Baric and Daszak were the co-authors of a 2018 research proposal submitted to the Pentagon that outlined plans to engineer a synthetic bat coronavirus at WIV with nearly identical characteristics to SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. That proposal was rejected, but there has long been speculation that Chinese researchers at WIV might have decided to carry out the proposed research anyway.
The Ebola connection with Qiu is also interesting. Although there is no suggestion that Qiu, individually, would have played a role, some journalists and researchers have suggested that the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa might have also been the product of a leak from a lab in Kenema, Sierra Leone, where U.S.-based scientists were conducting government-funded biodefense research on Ebola under lax biosafety conditions. Coincidentally—or not—two of the U.S. scientists involved in Ebola-related work at the lab in Kenema, Tulane virologist Robert Garry and Scripps virologist Kristian Andersen, later became members of the so-called SWAT team organized by Anthony Fauci to discredit the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins.
Read more here:
And here: https://usrtk.org/ebola/ebola-outbreak-origins/
→Axios’ Barak Ravid reports that the White House has asked the Pentagon and the State Department for a list of all upcoming U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, one day after more than three dozen House Democrats sent Biden a letter claiming that an Israeli invasion of Rafah would “contravene” a February White House memorandum demanding that Israel provide written assurances that it is complying with international law. The move is, for one thing, an object lesson in the administration’s double-dealing when it comes to Israel: The White House insists that the request is “not a signal of an imminent move” on military aid to Israel and indeed suggests that it is meant to “check in” to see whether Israel is getting all the weapons it wants, even though the purpose of leaking the move to Axios is clearly to offer a sop to the left and to exert pressure on Jerusalem. It is also an example of the administration’s ongoing “values feint” in which it disguises the pro-Iran tilt of its policy under concern for alleged humanitarian violations on the part of its traditional Middle East allies. As Tony Badran and Michael Doran described it in Tablet in 2021:
When Washington tilts toward Iran, it disguises its true motivations with pronouncements of high-minded humanitarianism—ceasing to be a superpower and instead becoming a Florence Nightingale among the nations, decrying human suffering and repeating mantras like “There is no military solution to this conflict.” The values feint exhorts allies, in public, not to retreat before Iran but to engage in the “three D’s”: diplomacy, dialogue, and de-escalation.
See also: State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller’s recent quote, included in yesterday’s Scroll, that defeating “the ideology behind Hamas” is “not something that can be accomplished on the battlefield.”
Read more here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/realignment-iran-biden-obama-michael-doran-tony-badran
→On that note, here’s our Image of the Day:
That’s an illustration of Iran’s nuclear breakout time, according to estimates from the Institute for Science and International Security, using data from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The graphic comes from Andrea Stricker and Anthony Ruggiero of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reported earlier this week that Iran’s illicit oil sales have hit $90 billion under the Biden administration. In the same article, Kredo reported that Iran’s “ghost armada” of oil tankers had grown from 70 ships in 2020 to 395 today.
→Quote of the Day:
In her ethnographic study of two conservative groups. Tripoldi (2018) found that information-seekers engage in a distinct set of media practices tied to the way they see the world. One practice centered around the close reading of textual documents deemed sacred (e.g. the Bible or the Constitution). … While lateral readers try to find secondary sources that reliably summarize expert consensus on sources and claims … respondents often focused on reading a wide array of primary sources and performing their own synthesis.
That’s from an approved 2021 MIT proposal to the National Science Foundation—included in a February report from the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government—to “co-design, test, adapt, and scale misinformation interventions” for groups “especially vulnerable to misinformation campaigns.” While the proposal praises the curiosity of conservatives who practice primary-source reading, it chides them for lacking the “key understandings and techniques to search effectively.” Those “key understandings and techniques,” as practiced by professional fact-checkers and other “lateral readers,” include opening several tabs to research the agenda and trustworthiness of a news source—as determined by “expert consensus” and professional fact-checkers.
What sort of results do these techniques yield? A quick Google search of “Tablet Magazine credibility” yields as one of its top hits a page from Media Bias/Fact Check, an independent fact-checker that shows “high agreement” with the government-funded NewsGuard and with BuzzFeed journalists, according to Wikipedia. The website rates Tablet as “right-center” and only “mostly credible” due to its promotion of “right-wing conspiracy theories.” As an example, the website cites Jacob Siegel’s 2022 article “Invasion of the Fact-Checkers,” which argues the following:
The fact-checkers have proved to be crucial compliance officers for the state, filtering out troublesome information before it reaches the public, torturing “the facts” until they conform to officially sanctioned narratives, and smearing dissenters as dangers to the public or stooges of Vladimir Putin. That’s the information ecology we are living in, and as a reporter I can tell you it stinks.
The Scroll’s own in-house fact-checking team (i.e., me) rates that statement “True.”
Read Jake’s piece here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/invasion-fact-checkers
→Biden plans to announce in his Thursday State of the Union address that he has ordered an “emergency mission” for the U.S. military to build a “temporary port” in Gaza that will allow the delivery of “hundreds of trucks” of humanitarian aid per day, Axios reports. This should, but won’t, serve as riposte to the various paranoiacs and antisemites entertaining the fantasy that the United States will put U.S. boots on the ground on behalf of Israel. Rather, we are putting boots on the ground to subsidize Hamas’ rule while accomplishing Hamas’ long-term goal of establishing a port in Gaza. An Israeli official told Axios that “Israel welcomes the initiative.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Stronghold, by Menachem Butler
On the prayer recited for IDF soldiers.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
The evidence is in their own poorly fabricated figures
By Abraham Wyner
The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”
Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.
If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.
The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.
This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.
Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.
This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.
Consider some further anomalies in the data: First, the death count reported on Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of misattribution or just reporting error. There are a few other days where the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact, the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.
Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.
There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.
Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
Are there better numbers? Some objective commentators have acknowledged Hamas’ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be roughly accurate. Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable guide. The fog of war is especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible to quickly determine civilian death totals with any accuracy. Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamas’ own misfired rockets, accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself.
The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.
Biden and Blinken's appeasement of Iran based Hamas and throwing Israel under the bus as to what it can do militarily leaves the Israelis with no choice but to do what is necessary in Rafah on their own terms,.
No problem!