Was Biden's Saudi Trip Worth It & FCC Commissioner Calls For TikTok Ban | Oh My World!

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Welcome back to Oh My World! with Hagar Chemali, your weekly dose of world news and foreign policy! Be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for all things Bold.

Biden Saudi Arabia Round-Up

If you're gonna promise to never meet with the crown prince because he's a murderous thug, then maybe you should have your comms team force the Saudis to have the king greet the president instead of his bratty son.

This trip was high risk because no matter how you slice it, the optics don't look great, you're pandering to a murderer and deep down you're going because of the high price of oil, which only makes it look like our human rights values can be sold for commercial interests.

The United States also does a lot of Saudi Arabia so it's unrealistic to think we would end this relationship. So if you're gonna go now you better come out with some good results.

So here are the outcomes and you decide who won the Biden-MBS boxing match.

First, the Saudis agreed to extend a cease-fire in Yemen for another 15 weeks and they also pledged over $1 billion for development projects and fuel support there.

Second, also agreed to allow Israeli planes to fly over its territory. This isn’t as minor as it sounds, because it can shave up to three hours off many of those flights. .

Third, this is a big one. The Saudis agreed to invest in US technology to build 5G and 6G, which to translate for you basically means they'll invest in our technology instead of China's.

On oil, there was nothing concrete other than a general promise to quote support “global oil market balancing.”

Biden said he told MBS he blames him for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which MBS denied because he legit doesn't care

There were some good outcomes but were they strong enough to merit such a high-risk trip?

MBS proved to the world that he just laid low for a while eventually the US president would come crawling back and would forget about his promise never to meet with him. And that's a problem because MBS might feel free to kill other dissidents in the future if he doesn't see too many consequences for his behavior.

FCC Calls For TikTok Ban

The Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission says the TikTok app should be removed from app stores because it poses a national security risk.

Tiktok is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance and generally Chinese companies are at the mercy of the Chinese government.

So if the government says give me your information, the company usually has no choice.

Because of this threat, President Trump tried to ban Tiktok and then he tried to make ByteDance sell its American business off a couple of years ago. This ended up getting challenged in court and so an agreement was reached where TikTok would store US information in physical data centers in the US owned by a company called Oracle.

And that was meant to prove that information about us users is the only stored here and not in China. That was until this explosive Buzzfeed article came out with leaked audio from a whole bunch of TikTok meetings showed that private American user data (things like your birthday and phone number) has been repeatedly and recently accessed by ByteDance's employees in China.

Tiktok says there's no security threat because the information isn't shared with the Chinese government and is subject to robust cybersecurity controls.

Want to see more on these topics, and who’s on our Crush List and $h!t List this week? Stay tuned to the video!

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

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