As lawmakers in both parties seem poised to enact legislation that could lead to TikTok shutting down in the United States, the Chinese spy app appears to have found an unlikely supporter in former President Donald Trump.
The app’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China and has been heavily scrutinized due to its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok, like many other social media apps, collects enormous amounts of data from its users, but its connection to the CCP has raised serious concerns that user data are being collected by the Chinese government, possibly giving it wide access to the personal information of millions of U.S. citizens. TikTok denies the CCP has access to user data.
Despite initially leading the charge to ban TikTok while he was in the White House in 2020, Trump, in a post on Truth Social, seemed to call for Congress to step away from its planned TikTok ban by claiming the end of the app would be a boon for Facebook.
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump wrote. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
In an interview on Monday with CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump said he does believe the app constitutes a national security threat, but he again iterated that Facebook would benefit if the app were shut down.
“There’s a lot of good, and there’s a lot of bad, with TikTok,” Trump said. “But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media.”
Trump is right to consider Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook to be problematic. The company and its CEO spent millions of dollars in the 2020 election to drive voter turnout and registration while providing grants to state elections offices, allowing the company to have a direct influence in the administration of elections.
Anyone who claims to care about the democratic process should be fearful of a massive corporation funding the administration of elections. However, the threat posed by Facebook, while real, is not nearly as big as the one posed by TikTok. Furthermore, there is no reason to assume TikTok’s loss will be Facebook’s gain. After all, part of the reason TikTok found a user base was that young people weren’t using Facebook.
As was evidenced last week by suicide and terrorist threats made to congressional offices by TikTok users, the Chinese spy app has an enormous influence over the mental health and well-being of its users. It is arguably the most addictive social media app available, and its video format lends itself to longer periods of mindless scrolling than other apps.
However, its data collection and relationship with the Chinese government are the biggest concern. As it stands today, massive amounts of information about U.S. citizens are accessible to a government that is openly hostile to the U.S. However well-founded concerns about Facebook’s influence on the public may be, any threat posed by the U.S.-based company pales in comparison to that of TikTok.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Through its algorithms and videos, TikTok has the ability to influence the way young people, who are in the most impressionable stage of their lives, think. It is not difficult to imagine scenarios in which this corporation, at the behest of the Chinese government, directs children in the U.S. to videos that glamorize the communist dictatorship. Or in a scenario in which the U.S. supports Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, suddenly young people stateside are told the U.S. is the aggressor in the conflict and that protests should be organized in support of China.
If TikTok is allowed to continue operating in the U.S., China’s totalitarian communist government will enjoy a growing base of support among the young people of the nation. This is a far greater threat to the public than any influence Facebook and Zuckerberg can wield.
