I’d like to ban the Communist Party — in China. But TikTok — here?
The app’s possible use as spyware and worse by Chinese Communist Party operatives should be
“Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government,” explains The New York Times. “They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.”
This concerns me enough to not be on TikTok, but while we smell smoke, I see no smoking gun.
And banning Tik Tok has every appearance of doing what the CCP would do — and did with Facebook and YouTube and X (formerly known as Prince — er, Twitter). Not to mention being unconstitutional.
The TikTok ban that passed the House last week — with only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voting No — if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would set up another level of surveillance and Internet control that would be used against American citizens beyond users of this social media
It comes down to good ends not justifying evil means, in this case an all-out government attack upon freedom of speech and press.
There are things the federal government could do — and already has done — to limit TikTok’s influence. Last year, the U.S. (along with Canada) banned it from all government devices.
This didn’t even require an act of Congress. Arguably, Trump could have done this with Facebook and Twitter on federal government devices when it became clear that these platforms were being used to orchestrate partisan speech control.
And, of course, a general social cause against TikTok could be engaged without threat of force. Political leaders owe it to the people to speak out.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “TikTok Smoke But No Gun?”
Yes.
If specific actions are, for some good cause, to be prevented, just those actions should be banned. Possibly the penalties for violating those bans should include confiscating plant or blocking service, but only upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the bans have been violated.
And, in fact, we may reasonably believe that the Chinese state has breached security of most or all major Internet services, and collects pretty much all the sensitive data that it wants, without TikTok.
Meanwhile, TikTok itself seems to be a great monkey-dance. Should we care that the Chinese state can watch the monkeys dance? Would the monkeys not merely dance elsewhere if they weren’t dancing on TikTok?
Chinese brainwashing methods used on American soldiers during the Korean war:
https://law.jrank.org/pages/1124/Excuse-Duress-Brainwashing.html
No personal data is safe on the internet, no matter what platform you use. Witness the data breaches that have occurred in just the last few years. My concern for this legislation (which doesn’t impact me, since I have never used Tik Tok or Facebook or X) is its constitutionality and what would seem to be a breach of international agreements. Then again, it is fun to watch globalists suddenly go nationalist. The same people that had no problem sending our vital industries to China and who cooed about the global community are changing their tune, all for votes in an election year.