SOCIAL MEDIA, POLITICS, TECHNOLOGY

Is TikTok In Trouble?

⏱ Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes

Yo, is TikTok in trouble? It looks like Congress has gone ahead and voted to ban TikTok, and President Biden said that if Congress were to approve the ban, he’d happily approve and pass the legislation to make it official. Now, I’m no American, but this sounds like a bad idea and a bit of a slippery slope. The notion of banning platforms seems a little contrary to the First Amendment and, you know, the one about free speech and all that. I’m no constitutional expert, though, but making the soapbox that so many people rant from and taking that away just seems wrong.

And I’m not even a fan of TikTok, generally. The app’s a complete mind suck and has led to some of the weirdest parasocial movements, whether it was like the weird TikTok dances or the whole NPC live stream craze. It’s not that Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, or Twitch haven’t contributed to their own types of degeneracy; TikTok does kind of hold a whole niche on some of this content. But goofy dances aside, TikTok has also contributed considerably to helping new voices—comedians, artists, activists—get discovered. Andrew Schulz, Connor Price—I discovered all these guys on TikTok. I mean, TikTok’s reach, especially with Gen Z, is unquestionable. So much so that the ADL also blamed TikTok for its own propaganda narrative of the war against Palestine from being particularly effective.

The issue in the United States and support for Israel is not left and right; it is young and old, and the numbers of young people who think that Hamas’s massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high. And so we really have a TikTok problem. The question on everyone’s mind is, why does the US see TikTok as a threat? The short and sweet of it seems that some states and governors have totally bought into the notion that TikTok is corrupting its citizens and spying on them at the behest of China. The governor of Montana last year passed legislation trying to ban TikTok. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but I guess if you’re from there, you ain’t allowed to access the app, or do ISPs and stuff just block it?

Not only is the fear that it’s spying, but they’re saying that it’s helping push narratives to Americans that aren’t in the government’s best interest or maybe contrary to the government’s actual position, again, on behalf of China. It seems odd, though. I mean, America, the country that was caught red-handed spying on Americans and presumably everyone else in the world not all that long ago, they’re the ones worried about this? I know it’s almost been a decade since Snowden blew the whistle on just how deep the NSA’s tentacles were in all our business, but yeah, those guys are afraid that China might be spying on us? Seems a bit, how you say, hypocritical.

The notion of the app pushing propaganda just makes you wonder if these guys have ever looked in the mirror. The Twitter Files showed just how some of these apps were being used by governments to silence narratives and push the ones it wants. Oddly enough, the Twitter Files really didn’t seem to get that kind of groundbreaking attention you think they’d have deserved, given just how damning some of those reports were. What I’m getting at is it seems that America’s main beef with TikTok is that it could be China doing what they’ve been doing all along.

Also makes you wonder how or what Google, Meta, and probably even X are doing to keep the heat off them. Maybe it’s just that they’re nowhere near as popular or as good, or maybe it’s that TikTok is just better with the younger demographic, which means it’s really about, ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ But is TikTok actually controlled by China? The answer seems to be no, but I wouldn’t rule out any type of involvement, directly or not. The Chinese government seems to have some kind of stake in ByteDance, which in turn has a stake in TikTok, so it’s not that much of a stretch to see how all these dots connect. But what about all these US-based tech giants? Are we saying that no American politician has some kind of stake in them?

It’s not that I’m dismissing China spying or having a hand in TikTok; it’s that I don’t see how this is all that different than the Americans using Big Tech to influence us. Maybe I have to be more concerned about anyone watching us, but sometimes it feels like that ship’s long sailed. Overall, though, it just seems like a weird and horrible precedent to be setting. Does this mean that any app or platform that refuses to push the government’s approved messaging gets banned? I feel like that’s where we’re headed. There’s this famous quote, which I’m probably about to butcher, but just bear with me, which goes something like, ‘I may not like what you’re saying, but I believe in your right to say it,’ which is kind of where I stand on why this is a horrible move.

Yeah, sure, maybe this could all reduce some of that brain rot that is being fed to kids by algorithms concerned more with maximizing time in the app, but there’s this other thing that I think ought to be just as effective: parents. You know, those people that make the kid and are responsible for raising them? Yeah, those people ought to be the ones really helping control the flow of poisonous dopamine to their kids. But hey, what would I know about that? Guess it’s just easier to hand our kids a phone and tell them to go sit quietly somewhere while we sit and enjoy our own mindless doom scrolling. No matter how I look at this, though, I just don’t see how this could be a good thing overall. Could just be my old libertarian tendencies resurfacing again. I’m curious to see how this all pans out and what it means for everyone else in the space—the creators, the consumers, yeah, and even the advertisers. Anyways, that’s all I got to say on that one, but till the next one, peace.

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updated_at 31-07-2025
Ai Disclosure: The above posts were transcribed using AI tools. Some language may not have been accurately transcribed.
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