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The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
tiktok is owned by bytedance. bytedance, as a chinese corporation, is de facto and de jure an arm of the chinese government. good enough reason to ban it.
hundreds of millions of americans using a chinese government controlled app where videos are artificially trended and allowed content adheres to sharply partisan ideology makes a ban demanded by reason. appeals to hypocrisy convince none but i can't not point out if the app were owned by a russian company it would have been banned-or-forced-sold during the trump admin.
as i hear it, congress has been asking a bunch of stupid questions about general privacy when they should be focusing on china, content policy, and controlling trending. maybe they have. i haven't looked.
you don't need all that to want it banned. tiktok's probably the worst thing ever invented. the only thing more purely and essentially cynical will be when we can hook a couple electrodes to our heads or plug a cable into our neck sockets and tell an app to make us feel whatever we want to feel. there are very few more wasteful uses of time, and there are no spiritually worse ways to spend time. viewing it with skepticism or distaste isn't a moral panic and it isn't at all comparable to works of fiction like novels with adult themes. social media is a truly unique harm. heavy users suffer the same kind of psychosocial radiation as people who live in big cities. parasocial relationships are very real and they're not just for people who fawn over actors, youtubers, instagram models and tiktokers, we experience it to a small degree with everybody we see in our social media networks. so we want to fit in, we want to be well-liked, and we can't help but compare ourselves with everyone else. for the developing mind in a community of effectively millions this is incredibly dangerous. spiking rates of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide can be blamed in part on burning years in fear of sarscov2, but the rest entirely on use of twitter, instagram, tiktok, and whatever else kids use now. every single kid who has a smart phone is walking around with the elephant's foot in their pocket and we're laughing at the people closest to doing anything about it. they deserve to be laughed at, i guess . . .
Meh. Twitter was, until Musk's takeover, de facto an arm of the US deep state. And they're not likely to be more benevolent than China, and they're a whole lot closer. I'd rather have foreign propaganda AND domestic propaganda (especially if it's clear which is which, which it is in this case) than just the domestic.
Really wouldn't be much of a loss per se if both of them were banned... but of course, the loss would be in creating a precedent of the government censorship. Like we don't have enough of it right now.
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