TikTok is in serious trouble as of recently. The United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 7521 or the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” which requires ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, to find a buyer in the next six months or have the app banned.
President Joe Biden has expressed willingness to sign the bill if passed. Donald Trump previously expressed interest in banning the app while he was president as well.
Trump wanted to ban the app and changed his tune, it is Biden’s turn to jump on the bandwagon. This goes back to something I have previously said, our politics has turned into pearl-clutching and virtue signaling. Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley and other neo-conservatives had alluded to the app as turning people into anti-semites and being a source of Hamas propaganda.
Others are concerned with the holding company, ByteDance, being a Chinese company and potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Sen. Tom Cotton was so concerned about CCP ties that he had asked the Singaporean CEO nearly 10 different ways to confirm his nationality.
170 million Americans, mostly younger people, are on TikTok sharing information and voicing political concerns in the manner they see fit. The government’s answer is to ban it, not listen to young people’s anger over the brutal war in Gaza, where millions of people are on the verge of famine or starving to death. Their fear is the CCP, a foreign adversary, having access to your personal information, but they will not bat an eyelash at the fact the U.S. government has all of those same abilities and so do American social media companies who have no qualms with selling your information to the highest bidder.
This bill passed the House with a vote of 352-65, which means 81% of them voted yes. 81% of the House has never voted for anything good, and there are real problems that affect Americans every day that need to be addressed. Roughly 100,000 Americans overdosed last year, there are some people who struggle every day with the affordability of healthcare and die because of it, there are roughly 500,000 homeless people in the U.S. 50,000 of which are veterans, there is an entire generation who is likely to not own a house because they are drowning in debt. Why are we not up in arms?
This is the richest country in the history of the world and we are going mental over social media because some boomer politicians got their feelings hurt over what young people think about their policy choices and fake outrage over privacy that was not there in the first place. If this is the best we have got then, man are we in trouble.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
tfitzpatrick@kscequinox.com
