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WASHINGTON — The House is poised to pass legislation Wednesday that could ban TikTok in the U.S. as Republicans and Democrats alike sound the alarm that the popular video-sharing app is a national security threat.
TikTok, owned by China-based parent company ByteDance, is mounting an aggressive lobbying campaign to kill the legislation, arguing that it would violate the First Amendment rights of its 170 million U.S. users and harm thousands of small businesses that rely on it.
That means TikTok, which FBI Director Christopher Wray has testified poses a risk to national security, could face a ban unless ByteDance acted quickly to divest it.
U.S. lawmakers and intelligence officials worry the Chinese government could use TikTok to access personal data from its millions of users and use algorithms to show them videos that could influence their views, including in the coming presidential election.
Testifying before Congress a year ago, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew denied that the Chinese government controls the app and pushed back against suggestions that China accesses U.S. user data.
Outside the Capitol, a handful of young House Democrats — Robert Garcia and Sarah Jacobs of California, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Delia Ramirez of Illinois — rallied alongside TikTok creators to express their opposition to the bill.
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That’s one way to spread the message to the world that you’ve given up on freedom and democracy. It’s as if TikTok is a monster that eats the brains of our children, and the problem they have with it is that the wrong person is holding its leash.
I am not advocating for the “alternatives” (i.e. Instagram and the likes), however I think banning a Chinese PSYOP indoctrinating a whole generation with far-right ideas can only be positive for society. Hopefully the EU does something similar.
EFF sent out a campaign to their mailing list this morning about how banning it is a bad move for free speech and a better option would be to create actual data privacy laws that companies have to follow to do business in the US, but of course that would just put more money in politicians pockets to ensure it never sees the light of day.
I like the though of enforcing regulations on certain permissions such as location, network info, contacts, etc so apps can’t just data mine it. I’d also like laws to make these apps function with certain access restricted by the user. My car app for example pops up with permission requests saying it can’t function without getting location data in the background. I just want to remote start my damn car.
everybody is pro capitalism until someone else beats them.
I don’t use the platform so I’m not as familiar to if this is general nationalist issue or about specific practices in TikTok. I do think this is a slippery slope, though. Im afraid our elected officials are just too far behind on Technology to look at the broader issues on privacy and technology - this might pass simply because they can slap “not US = bad” on a campaign bus. It likely will boost VPN usage and/or drive people to less mature and even less privacy concerned services.
As a conservative I generally hate the idea of Chinese software collecting all our national selfie secrets, but I hate the idea of banning companies even more.
If there’s a problem about national security as it relates to Chinese social media, we need to address that with education not banning apps.
