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Not since the ban made alcohol sales illegal has Americans talked about banning a product used by as many Americans as Tiktok, said Shira Ovide in Washington Post. Washington is worried about the omnipotent short video app’s tape to China. And in fact, experts are conceivable that “Tiktok and other Chinese technology companies can be Trojan horses for the Chinese Communist Party to reap information about Americans or Spew propaganda.” Legislators have done that case for several years. But throughout that time, they have not yet produced “specific evidence of injury.” Maybe there is “classified information about the threat of Chinese technology”, but the American people need a better answer than “Trust us, Tiktok is bad.”
No one came out and looked good last week when Congress pulled in Tiktok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, for questioning, Kyle Chayka said New Yorker. “The procedures, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Negotiations 2018 around the Cambridge Analytica scandal,” created “a rare opportunity for two -party unit.” The antagonism against Tiktok’s China band was clear, but the house members, who often sound very shaky on technical details, also tried “to throw the company as a scapegoat for the sins” for all social media companies and their algorithms. Videos that mock the legislators drew millions of views – where else? – On Tiktok. At the same time, Chew struggled to convince the committee members that TikTok could be protected from Chinese influence. “His comments for the headboard gave the impression that his bosses on Bythance had banned him from saying something of a lot of substance.”
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How many users it has, there are just not “disadvantages” to the country in a Tiktok ban, said Noah Smith in his substack blog, Noahpinion. “China banned Google and Facebook and any number of US apps and platforms,” and it forces us companies to “toe the CCP line at Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang or any other issue that the Chinese government cares about.” The United States has “practiced no such” sharp power “against China”, and held on to its principles of globalization. But it is not clear what America has “derived from this arrangement other than a sense of self -righteousness.” The Internet did not stop liberalizing China, it only ended by making us citizens “more subject to the dictation of the foreign authorities.” TikTok has specifically had “four years to save himself,” said Tim Culpan in Bloomberg. The Trump administration first flowed the idea of a ban in 2019. That Tiktok managers “did not change the needle on public opinion, especially among decision makers, is a major failure.” If Tiktok is blocked from the United States, it deserves its fate.
Perhaps the United States may be justified to close Tiktok, but the price abandons “the idea that Americans should have access to information from all over the world on their own terms,” said Adi Robertson in Residual. And of course we would turn off the speech from all American users who have devoted their energy to the platform. We are moving towards a future where we can import almost anything from China but speech. If it sounds familiar, it is because we have decided that “the only way to beat China is to join it.”
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