TikTok is acting shady (again)

Hello again and happy Thursday. I’m your host, Paul Szoldra. Time again for the rundown of national security news in The Ruck. As usual, there’s a lot happening this week—including the most recent TikTok acting shady news story (I’m sensing a trend) and a Swiss hacker kinda just stumbling on the TSA’s super secret “No Fly” list.

Let’s get to it…

• Yet another new and groundbreaking story on TikTok: The service has a secret “heating” button that can make a video go viral, according to Forbes. A powerful lever of influence in the hands of a few.

  • “For TikTok, fears of political manipulation are tied to concern that the Chinese government could coerce the platform’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, into amplifying or suppressing certain narratives on TikTok. TikTok has acknowledged that it previously censored content critical of China, and last year, former ByteDance employees told BuzzFeed News that another ByteDance app, a now-defunct news aggregator called TopBuzz, had pinned ‘pro-China messages’ to the top of its news feed for U.S. consumers. ByteDance denied the report.”

  • “TikTok declined to answer questions about whether employees located in China have ever heated content, or whether the company has ever heated content produced by the Chinese government or Chinese state media.”

  • They didn’t even issue a non-denial denial. 🤔

• A U.S. Navy SEAL listed in "an active deserter status since March 11, 2019" was killed last week while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces on an operation in Bakhmut, according to Time Magazine.

  • “He only had one uniform…He used duct tape to tape armored plates to his chest and back to go on target until he was given a plate carrier,” a friend said of former Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Daniel Swift’s time in Ukraine. “After our SEAL Team Six guy left, he led our team in [Kherson Oblast], Severodonetsk, and Svyatohirsk, and continued to lead the team after I left. He was one of the hardest and most tactically proficient men I have ever met.” 

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• A North Korean man was sentenced to 45 months in prison for money laundering offenses. He "is the