Tomorrow, Tiktok will go dark in the United States.
Well, kind of.
Americans can still use the app if they have it already installed, and no one will be coming after them for using it. Tiktok will just become unavailable on the Apple and Google Play store. Unconfirmed reports are circulating that incoming President Trump might extend the deadline 90 days.
The one “out” Tiktok has is to sell the platform to someone with no ties to the Chinese government. Yesterday (Friday), “Shark Tank” billionaire Kevin O’Leary put an offer on the table to buy the platform for $20 billion in cash, but as of yet he has received no response.
However, as a response to this ban, Gen Z users across America are downloading another Chinese owned social media app called Red Note, which ironically is named after Chinese totalitarian dictator Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, which launched the Chinese rebellion into Communism resulting in the slaughter of millions.
That’ll show us.
Now, I am against censorship in all forms. (One could argue that no individual user is being “censored”–there’s a swamp of social media platforms out there. The business itself is deemed a threat to national security.)
Part of me is uncomfortable with this ban. However, the outcry of the banning of Tiktok has me more than a little puzzled.
A little over a year ago, Tiktok was seen as very dangerous to national security. To this day, all federal and state government devices cannot have the app installed because of those ties to China.
This is the same China that flew a spy balloon the size of a school bus over all important military bases across the United States, collecting and transmitting God knows how many secrets back across the Pacific.
This is the same China buying up land bordering United States’ military bases, including Minot Air Force Base, and even Malmstrom Air Force Base here in Montana, which by the way, happens to control the launches of ICBMs in the northern plains states. Nothing suspicious there.
It is also the same China that, according to NBC News, have hacked our infrastructures—including but not limited to the Treasury Department and Office of Personal Management—and building dossiers on tens of millions of Americans. Apparently, they have done this under our noses since 2014.
Surely, there is nothing nefarious going on in back doors of the Tiktok app which, under communism’s economic structure, is ultimately owned not by ByteDance but by the Chinese government itself.
Then, to add fuel to my suspicion, no one seems to remember that following the Hamas invasion of Israel and the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Tiktok’s algorithms showed clear favoritism toward pro-Palestinian posts nearly 10-to-1 over pro-Israeli posts.
I also remember listening to Podcaster Joe Rogan “going down the rabbit hole” reading the Tiktok Terms of Service live on-air.
These included, according to Rogan, Tiktok’s right to collect the user’s “mobile carrier, time zone settings, identifiers for advertising purpose, model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types.”
Of course, the average naïve Gen Z user responds with a shrug and a flippant, “So what. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Rogan continues, ‘So all your apps and all your file names, all the things you have filed away on your phone, they have access to that…File names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms. So they’re monitoring your keystrokes, which means they know every f***ing thing you type. [Including passwords].” If you login to multiple devices, Tiktok “will be able to use your profile information to identify your activity across devices…We may also associate you with information collected from devices other than those you use to log into the platform.”
Tiktok possesses enough information on you to even “shut down people’s accounts [including financial].”
How quickly we’ve forgotten.
Knowing this level of manipulation, I am not necessarily sad to see Tiktok placed under pressure to sell or go away.
I am troubled that, knowing all this information, many Americans just don’t care. It seems Tiktok users and highly misnamed “influencers” are willing to sell their souls for seconds of meaningless entertainment and cash.
China doesn’t need to invade us. We are willing to give ourselves over to the threat solely on our own.
China is using our own nation’s strengths against us.
Honestly, Tiktok shouldn’t need to be banned. Americans should be much smarter and wiser.
TikTok users in the United States should have the presence of mind to know that a nation that hates everything we stand for is leading us right off a cliff.
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