Tom Tugendhat’s war on TikTok

As the Tory leadership race heats up, all six candidates are trying to draw dividing lines to stand out to their fellow MPs – and the membership. Now Tom Tugendhat has taken to Twitter to make clear his stance on the all-important issue of, um, TikTok. The China hawk has slammed the Beijing-based social media platform, telling his Twitter followers that ‘unlike other candidates, you won’t have seen my videos on TikTok’. The app, Tugendhat says, is ‘controlled by a foreign country’ that ‘doesn’t share any of our values and in fact silences debate’. Don’t hold back…

The Conservative leadership contender continued his tirade:

TikTok is owned by a company called ByteDance, which is headquartered in China. That means the code, the algorithm, that decides what you see and perhaps more importantly what you don’t, is written by people who are under the control of the Chinese Communist Party… We’ve seen huge problems with human rights in that country… I’m not going to do anything that encourages people to use a news source that is controlled by a foreign country and one in particular that doesn’t share any of our values and in fact silences debate.

Strong stuff. Still, it seems to be having an effect: Tugendhat’s video currently has more views than every other candidates’ TikTok videos combined. It’s in keeping with his past record too. The former chairman of the foreign affairs select committee was previously sanctioned by China and was quick to slam the creation of parliament’s TikTok account back in 2022. Tugendhat even took a swipe at then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron last year over his change in stance on China – a country Lord Cameron once hailed a ‘golden era’ of relations with when he was prime minister.

The Tonbridge Tory’s pop at the platform comes after many of his political opponents have launched a social media attack of their own – on Twitter. Labour MPs have started to ditch the Elon Musk-owned site following the tech billionaire’s recent remarks on the UK riots and the new PM Sir Keir Starmer. Jess Phillips – the Home Office minister who recently apologised after she was accused of ‘making excuses’ for a masked mob that descended on Birmingham – has said she wants to decrease her use of the site, adding it had become a ‘bit despotic’ and was ‘a place of misery now’.

New Labour MP Josh Simons is looking into using alternative platforms, blasting the US businessman for turning Twitter ‘into a megaphone for foreign adversaries and far-right fringe groups’. Sunderland Central Lewis Atkinson told the Guardian that he reckons around 30 of his colleagues are now using the Meta-owned site Threads, while Jo Platt and Noah Law are among those who have turned away from Twitter altogether. Crikey. Talk about analogue in a digital age…