It’s a new day in America. Inflation has mostly stabilized, Donald Trump is President again, and – against all reason – the current battle in Washington is over a baffling, hypocritical TikTok ban.
Recently, legislators in Washington finally realized that allowing an app with ties to our nation’s greatest foreign adversary to collect data from Americans was probably a bad idea. However, instead of doing anything that might actually solve the problem, Congress and the Supreme Court have shoved their necks in the sand and chosen prohibition, a strategy that has repeatedly been a complete policy failure. Fortunately, the Trump administration is taking steps to reverse this decision.
I understand the national security risk posed by the popularity of an app subject to having user information collected by China’s authoritarian regime. It’s perfectly logical to want to keep this valuable data far away from Beijing. However, this strategy of banning a widely beloved product has failed before (alcohol, anybody?), and it has already failed again; Americans are flocking to RedNote, an app with even stronger ties to China, arguably creating an even larger security risk than before.
There’s also the hypocrisy of cracking down on TikTok for collecting data, while ignoring our own tech companies guilty of the same. Meta is notorious for collecting vast amounts of personal information, while many other companies have begun harvesting data for dubious AI projects. Despite obvious concern, this practice remains legal – for American companies.
Banning TikTok also eliminates desperately-needed competition in the market. Removing such a prominent option will further consolidate control in the hands of Internet oligarchs Meta and Google, who’s own Instagram and YouTube are direct competitors of TikTok. Worse yet, ByteDance is considering selling the app to Elon Musk, which would hand a media empire to the same billionaire political extremist responsible for the ruining of Twitter.
I don’t agree with Trump on most issues. However, I am relieved to hear that he wishes to permanently table the TikTok ban, and I hope this nonsense ends quickly. Either that, or he may just let Musk buy it out, which, actually, he probably will. New day in America, same as yesterday.
