So what if the United States has successfully warded off the Chinese Communist Party’s Huawei from infiltrating our 5G development? China still has a one-way intelligence back door into the U.S. in the form of TikTok, the Chinese video networking platform that answers directly to Beijing.
The app has been downloaded 165 million times in the U.S., meaning that if each download is unique, more than half of our population has turned over its most sensitive data to the Chinese Communist Party.
India, in contrast, refuses to continue to aid and abet Beijing. In an escalation of the long-simmering border conflict between India and China, the former took the unprecedented measure of banning 58 apps used by the Chinese Communist Party to surveil users in other nations, TikTok being the most prevalent in the Western world.
It’s difficult to see how a blanket ban on TikTok downloads in the U.S. would be either legal or wise, but it’s clear that India has the right idea, and we should do about it.
We already know that sites and services such as Facebook and Google are “free” because you, the user, are the product — your data gets sold for profit to advertisers. But allowing your profile to be mined for targeted ads about domestic politicians and fast fashion is a world away from servicing a dictatorship that unleashed a deadly pandemic across the world and is currently committing de facto genocide against its Muslim citizens.
And yet, clout-chasers like Taylor Lorenz at the New York Times, who claimed that a senator’s op-ed in her newspaper put lives at risk by expressing an opinion shared by 58% of the nation, reports glibly on Gen Zers selling their lives away to the Chinese Communist Party — in fact, she’s nearly encouraging it. Here is Lorenz defending using the paper of record to signal-boost the underage daughter of a top Trump administration official’s TikTok:
She already had thousands of views and has been going viral on TikTok for her vids about her mom, also I talked to her abt tweeting and we are mutuals. Idk what you want but she’s her own person growing her own online audience! https://t.co/yUezOb4Fh5 https://t.co/onFFtdkfKR
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) June 30, 2020
Not for me! I write about teenage influencers and TikTok stars. I think it’s great that young people are making their voices and views heard online. You can read my coverage here 🙂 https://t.co/ZB9ZIlG10z
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) June 30, 2020
Not only does TikTok mine user data, but it also assists evil regimes in their pursuits of censorship. Given its direct access to Beijing, it comes as no surprise that TikTok censors information portraying the Communist Party in a critical light. What’s perhaps less logical but just as galling is its willingness to aid Turkey in silencing content supportive of the Kurds. In nations that criminalize homosexuality, TikTok is happy to censor contrary opinions.
And yet this is how top tech reporters try to whitewash TikTok in relation to other domestic tech companies:
when are we going to stop being shocked that apps collect data on us, and then use that data for profit
if youre mad about tiktok rn then i have bad news about your weather app, your dating app, your OTHER dating app (?), your to-do list app, your diet tracker app…
— shoshana wodinsky (@swodinsky) June 29, 2020
An entire generation of millennials already sold its data to American companies in pursuit of profit. Yet we’re still allowing the next generation to sell data not to American companies but to a racist, genocidal regime — all in exchange for 15 minutes of fame. We may not be able to adopt its policy, but India has the right attitude. It’s high time consumers made their own choice to eradicate the filth that is TikTok from the free world’s devices.
