Banning TikTok

The big news lately is how the US government is moving towards banning TikTok. It’s way more popular than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or any of those. To me all of them are very 2010s—TikTok is the only one that feels like it has a real place in the 2020s. Yet despite being the clear choice of consumers for their social media, the US government wants to ban it. What’s going on?

One of the weirdest things about the drive to ban TikTok is the rarest thing in American politics today—a bipartisan consensus. Democrats and Republicans have never been further apart than today—congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene even proposed a national divorce—but on the issue of banning TikTok, they seem to be in lockstep. This should be seen as very fishy, but people who claim to be skeptical of both left and right—like the idiots at Compact Magazine—are lavishing praise on this bipartisan consensus. The American government is at its most evil when it is acting unified, when it has a bipartisan consensus. It's better when it is divided, so it can't do anything. Pretty much the last time it acted with real unity was in the lead up to the Iraq War—they only reach agreement in order to do something evil.

At the hearings in Washington, DC, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers told the TikTok CEO why the American political establishment hates his app: “We do not trust TikTok will ever embrace American values—values for freedom, human rights and innovation. TikTok has repeatedly chosen the path for more control, more surveillance and more manipulation.”

Okay, lots to unpack here. She is saying that banning an app that is wildly popular with American consumers is a way to…uphold American values like freedom? How is banning something a way of upholding freedom? Doesn’t make any sense at all. Invoking “human rights” is also insane, because America has the worst human rights record in the world, any way you slice it. We’re the only country that ever dropped a fucking nuclear bomb on civilians; we were founded on slavery; our prisons are judged by international organizations to be the worst in the world; we have 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners; we’re the only democracy that has the death penalty; we destroyed Iraq and killed millions for no reason other than oil; we give billions of dollars to the apartheid state of Israel…and that’s just a very short list off the top of my head. And somehow an app is a serious violation of human rights and requires an act of Congress?

The bit about “innovation” is also hilarious, because the whole crusade against TikTok is based on how powerful its algorithm is…it’s so powerful that it’s controlling the minds of young Americans! (They claim). But also it is somehow stifling innovation? It is the most innovative technology in years. It doesn’t make any sense. And what’s more, idiotic political tools like Cathy whatsherface know that they aren’t making sense—they don’t understand technology, sociology, critical thinking, logic, or anything else. They’re just being told to do something and they’re doing it.

There is lots of talk about how harmful TikTok is to the mental health of American teenagers, because it is so addictive, and so on. This is certainly true, but, um, social media has been around for going on twenty years now, and it was always designed to be addictive and to drive its users insane. There was a story a couple years ago about how Facebook (who owns Instagram) knew full well how poisonous Instagram was for its users—and they did not give a shit, they did nothing to change it. And has Facebook been held accountable for this? Has it faced any real penalties? Has Instagram been banned? No, of course not. And it has been around for a lot longer than TikTok.

Is TikTok a good use of time? Hell no. Do I wish people would spend their time reading or doing literally anything else than mindlessly watching little videos the app feeds to them? Yup. But is TikTok really that much worse than other social media, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and so on? I would say no—in fact it might be better for you, because it is actually about the content. I’m not saying TikTok videos are great sources of entertainment or information or education—but it is at least a real way to convey content. Compare a video to a tweet—there’s no comparison. What the hell is a “tweet” anyway? Can you learn anything from it? Almost never. At best, it’s the very beginning of a thought, which needs to be expanded, completed, developed (which it never is). Facebook has posts which are basically the same. Instagram is just pictures. You can’t learn anything from any of that. What those sites are good at is spreading bullshit and helping insane people build fake communities around the bullshit. That’s about it.

And as for the fake worry that TikTok will have severe real world consequences…the people pushing this alarmism all hate Donald Trump, and without Twitter, there’s no way he becomes president. That’s what made him influential and popular enough to win in 2016. If they want to ban something, they could ban that. But they just want to ban TikTok.

It’s obviously a smokescreen for a sinister power grab—the bill to ban TikTok is called the RESTRICT Act. Sounds a lot like the PATRIOT Act to me. And that turned out great, didn’t it?