TikTok should be banned, regardless of who owns it
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Data collection is the modern-day arms race as corporations and governments across the world both desperately compete to control the most information about all of us.
The applications we use daily give us the false impression that we are customers instead of what we really are: information commodities to be sold off to the highest bidder.
The battle over whether TikTok, owned by China-based parent-company ByteDance, should remain available to the American public to utilise is not about the preservation of American’s information against a foreign semi-hostile nation but about who gets to control this social media weaponry.
TikTok is owned entirely as a subsidiary of Chinese tech firm ByteDance Ltd, and some US politicians believe that ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese government – which could push for US user data to be released to them at any time.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill with 352 to 65 votes called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, that could lead to a ban on TikTok from any application store in the US market.
The bill would place a penalty onto application stores of upwards $5,000 per user of a banned application. In the case of TikTok, Google and Apple could each face a fine of $850 billion if they were to violate this ban with TikTok’s current ownership.
With a looming force of ownership change, Steve Mnuchin, an investment banker and former Treasury Secretary, has already stated publicly his interest in purchasing TikTok along with a group of equally interested investors.
“I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin stated on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”. “This needs to be controlled by US business.”
Our federal government, with bipartisan support, framing this initiative as a measure to protect our information from potential Chinese influence is the sleight of hand trickery to have this information warhead move into the possession of an American corporate entity that’s willing to leave a backdoor open for American intelligence agencies.
If we see TikTok not as the largest social media platform but instead one of the greatest data collection apparatuses in human history, then it makes sense as to why there is a push to dictate who controls this information and who has access to its user base.
The lessons of the release of the “Twitter files” are that US intelligence agencies want to have either direct access to social media platforms or willing operators within these companies to help dictate dialogue, restrict narratives from spreading and harvest data on American citizens for investigative purposes.
Twitter’s censoring of The New York Post after their credible news story surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop was later proven to be influenced by a general warning made by federal law enforcement and deemed as Russian misinformation to minimise the negative impact against Joe Biden prior to the 2020 election.
Moving TikTok out of the hands of ByteDance into the hands of an American entity presents an opportunity to have intelligence agencies pressure them into compliance or, more favorably, allow a governmental friendly face like Mnuchin to be their proxy into this information and censorship goldmine.
For some of the proponents of this bill, they see the supposed harm it does to allow China access to having dictation over what gets amplified in America, with the assumption that in the hands of an American entity this content would become less pervasive and damaging on American youth.
However, the emphasis on purchasing TikTok is not motivated by some rare form of patriotic corporatism. They’re enthralled by the effectiveness of TikTok’s algorithm and strategy to exploit our attention at any cost to our culture: there is no need to fix what is not broken.
If the objective was to minimise some imagined harm of Chinese intervention in the interest of Americans, there are a myriad of other industries which we should be removing their money from that directly impact us all.
The American Enterprise Institute, which tracks large Chinese investments of $95 million or more, found that between 2005 and 2023 the United States has received $195 billion in Chinese large investments for nearly every major sector including energy, real estate and entertainment.
Chinese investors have directly affected potential American homebuyers ability to secure a home of their own, even spending $6.1 billion in 12 months purchasing residential properties.
They’re also no stranger to intellectual property theft, even stealing from their American business partners only to compete against them in the future, yet we refuse to restrict their access to our markets.
But somehow, despite a hyper-partisan DC environment, both parties in the House came together to target one entity as the greatest danger coming from this communist nation and we’re not supposed to find this to be the least bit suspicious?
Our federal government doesn’t hate the TikTok, it’s envious of it. They’re just as willing to target citizens when it’s politically expedient, push propaganda to confuse a nation and squash narratives that interfere with their objectives.
Having TikTok in their arsenal only makes them more efficient at crushing dissent.
