A proposed bill that would ban TikTok will be moving forward after the platform’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified in committee.
It is ridiculous that the government is considering banning a whole social media application, especially when it is accused of the same things that other social media platforms do. TikTok is very popular with younger generations, including many students here at Keene State. It would not be fair to the people who use it for fun to have it taken away from them. People should read the terms and conditions of an application to see if they agree with having their data shared and decide for themselves.
Chew was questioned by lawmakers sitting on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The biggest focus of questions were about TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, sharing data from American users with the Chinese government.
According to Geoffery Fowler of the Washington Post, “TikTok says it has not shared American user data with the Chinese government, nor would it do so if asked. Since last summer, it says it has routed all U.S. data to cloud services run by U.S. company Oracle and is in the process of moving older data there, too.”
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, wrote in a tweet, “It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true— China has access to TikTok user data. The House will be moving forward with legislation to protect Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party.” The legislation in question is named the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, or the RESTRICT Act.
According to Kevin Collier and Scott Wong from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the RESTRICT Act “would give the secretary of commerce broad power to regulate tech produced by six countries that have adversarial relationships with the U.S.: China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.”
Collier and Wong continue to say in the article that the bill would allow the American government to preempt situations where technology produced in these six countries becomes popular in the United States. This was the case with the Russian antivirus company Kaspersky and the Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei and ZTE. I am not saying that there are no legitimate concerns about the Chinese Communist Party spying on American TikTok users; it is just ludacris to focus all of the attention on foreign social media platforms while American companies already do this. TikTok is being accused of the same things that Meta and Google are already known to do. It would be just as crazy to ban Facebook or YouTube because they sell user data.
It is well known that social media tracks you and spies on you, and it should be up to the users to know this and decide for themselves if they want to trade their data for social media. I also find it very ironic that the government wants to restrict the free market in order to protect people from communism.
Throwing around the term communism to fearmonger the American people sadly did not stay in the 1950s. Politicians can successfully use McCarthyism to their heart’s content, and that is scarier than a tech company collecting data.
Other concerns about TikTok are that misinformation spreads on the application and it is addictive, something that Facebook and YouTube are guilty of as well. We do not need to be scared of TikTok because it is a foreign platform. If people want to use the platform, they should be allowed to.
Nico Brazill can be contacted at
nbrazill@kscequinox.com
