So, evidently, the White House is backing a ban on TikTok, even though the Biden Campaign is using the app. It’s pretty impressive that TikTok could trigger such a bipartisan desire to either shut it down or capture it and give it to an American company to manage, considering the general state of affairs of partisan warfare. I guess the argument is the Communist Chinese Government is capturing the American people’s personal information through the app, but excuse me, wasn’t that always the purpose of social media platforms generally? If TikTok is such a vile detriment to American society, why hasn’t X (Twitter) been shut down? On X — beyond the persistent racism and antisemitism on the platform — I regularly see pornographic content of every flavor appearing in my feed, I guess the bipartisan group of factfinders view that as perfectly alright.
Complete disclosure, I do have a TikTok account, but rarely view it, and have never posted anything to it. I do see TikTok content cross posted to other social media platforms pretty regularly, and those posts remind me of the early, pre-sanitized period of blogs and social media. The subject matter — by Americans — is not trapped in the narrow silo of bipartisan political battles. I see a lot of content regarding real world economic issues impacting Americans. I saw a post by a distraught student loan holder who realized she had been paying on her student loan for 10 years and the amount she owed had actually gone up. I saw another post about how hedge funds were buying up single family homes across the country, gating first time homebuyers from home ownership. I’ve seen posts of homeless encampments across the US, underscoring that the crisis isn’t just in Democrat run cities and Blue States. This is some of the content TikTok has delivered to me that I don’t see on American social media platforms. Is it actually the kind content posted on TikTok by Americans that has made it so important to shut down for Democrats and Republicans alike?
I hope not, because that says a lot.