The TikTok Dilemma
TikTok, the now infamous social media site, opened its doors in September of 2016. TikTok was originally a laughable replacement for Vine and Musical.ly but is now regarded as one of the fastest growing social media outlets. Early in 2020, President Trump made plans to ban TikTok in the United States because it is run through a Chinese internet technology site called ByteDance. Trump has made claims against the app on all things privacy and data mining. However, in the past few months (possibly the past year) TikTok has become an international marketing powerhouse where companies from Apple and Shein to your local farmers market have gone viral. TikTok gives regular people and major companies the same basic technology to create videos which receive incredible amounts of traction.
TikTok has stretched from videos circulating on the For You Page to being reposted on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook and almost any other social media outlets you can think of. The issue is, Trump isn’t a fan. Because the younger generation has grown the use of TikTok so much, many young users have millions of followers and are interacting with thousands of others daily. This means if one 15 year old girl makes a video complaining about Trump, she may get a few hundred thousand likes which, in Trumps eyes, is bad for business. One user went so far as to make a joke about purchasing tickets to a Trump rally and not showing up and it actually happened. You can imagine how disappointing it was for Trump to get punked by thousands of teens. Of course, TikTok wouldn’t be banned of it weren’t for a legitimate reason, right? The U.S. is worried about data mining and privacy concerns because the company is based in China.
The irony in this is incredible. The U.S. government is worried about our personal privacy? It seems that they may have been damaged just a tad during the 2016 elections. Regardless, Trump has put a plan into place which would ban TikTok in the United States in 45 days. However, Microsoft has confirmed they are interested in purchasing TikTok and the deal will be confirmed on September 15th if everything goes as planned. “This new structure would build on the experience TikTok users currently love, while adding world-class security, privacy, and digital safety protections,” Microsoft said. “The operating model for the service would be built to ensure transparency to users as well as appropriate security oversight by governments in these countries.”
The real issue here is that as a U.S. citizen and even more, a young one, many of us believe our personal privacy is a facade. Social media, paid advertising and targeted ads have made us question our privacy one too many times. Personally, I’m not worried about it. That many seem stupid but think about how much your phone really knows about you. Think about the times you’ve gotten an ad on Facebook that was eerily similar to something you were just thinking about. Do you really think the government doesn’t already know everything about you that it wants to? I just don’t think I’m an interesting enough person for the Chinese government to get information from, and many Americans feel the same. So, if so many of us feel this way, why is it so important to ban TikTok? How is TikTok a national security threat? We might never find out. Is this just a way from Trump to get back at the hundreds of thousands of teens that made a fool out of him or is this a serious state of emergency for the U.S. public?
