McCarthyism is alive and well in Washington once again.
Congress is marching toward the trampling of the U.S. Constitution, aided by media, talking heads and politicians at a frightening speed to ban TikTok if not forcing the company to sell to an American buyer. This, despite the fact that several international private equity groups (including American-owned General Atlantic) have investments in ByteDance. TikTok has over 170 million users and thousands of individuals and businesses in America who depend on revenue derived from the TikTok app.
For the United States government to forcibly cause a business to divest an entity operating legally in the U.S. without due process is simply un-American at its core. To date, there is not a single proven instance of malfeasance or the breaking of any laws. We have seen this movie before. Yet, they steam forward to roll over the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Let us examine each one of the claims used to justify the ban.
Election Interference – Those who want to ban TikTok are the same folks who have ostensibly done nothing of any consequence to hold other social media apps (especially Facebook) accountable for known election interference. The truth is, both Democrats and Republicans are nervous about TikTok’s ability (just as any other social media app could – and has…) to create algorithms benefiting one candidate or another. We can be assured those who protest the loudest believe their candidate will get the short end of any manipulated algorithm. The cure for this concern in the long term is laws that limit the ability to influence political dialogue through algorithm manipulation – not banning a specific app unless it continually violates existing laws and such, which were proven by due process.
National Security – The case for banning the app from government-issued employees’ phones is legitimate. It can be argued that federal employees shouldn’t be using any app wherein phones could be used to hack into government systems. There are countless other apps not permitted on corporate or government-issued phones which include porn, dating, gambling, and many, many other apps. Ban proponents are using this a deliberate conflation of a government issued phone as opposed to the use of the TikTok app for any American user on their privately-owned phones. Any employer has the right to limit how an employer-provided phone is used and what is allowed to be downloaded to it, and ultimately how it is used.
Ban proponents very public indignation is not because the CCP (via ownership of TikTok parent ByteDance) harvests data that resides on the phones – in which they likely do. It has more to do with the fact that someone else can put their hands on American citizen’s private data which historically has been the exclusive territory of the U.S. government intelligence agencies.
Politicians, government agencies, retired military officers, and those in Congress gleefully pontificate about how TikTok is a national security risk without ever telling us specifically how. Are there national secrets that are shared on TikTok by intelligence agencies? Are there critical and sensitive government communications on TikTok that can be intercepted? Has there been a single indictment involving TikTok regarding the stealing of national secrets to date – or proof that CCP is spying on the U.S. government using TikTok? No, there has not.
Pardon me for calling out the irony of those demanding a TikTok ban based on national security concerns. Mind you, these are the same exact folks who:
- Continue to authorize the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) and the Patriot Act allowing our government to spy on American citizens.
- Authorized the unconstitutional collection and warrantless search of American’s metadata in all our communications through secrete programs such as “Stellar Wind,” “Prism,” “Upstream” and likely others we are not aware of by awarding large government telecom contracts to their co-conspirators.
- Unconstitutionally abused the FISA courts repeatedly.
Many of these same proponents of the ban are the same people who have sat in Congress all the while our critical pharmaceutical, vaccines, and medical supply industry has been outsourced to China. The same people allowed U.S. investment into highly questionable gain-of-function experiments that led to the Covid outbreak. – and who still chooses not to hold China accountable for millions of American dead. The same people who won’t create laws that ban Chinese from buying up American farmland and investments into our critical private industry infrastructure.
Privacy Concerns – This may be the most hysterical justification of the ban. It is now an accepted fact for most Americans that our data is routinely captured, including everything from geo-data mapping to our buying habits, website preferences, and much more through advanced algorithms.
This data is sold and shared, including with agencies in our federal government. At the end of the day, it’s our job as the end-user to determine what risks with our personal data are acceptable and to take any actions (such as choosing not to download TikTok), including opting out of such data collection and sharing where possible or simply not using sites or apps that do so.
Poisoning of Young Minds – Suddenly, our government is concerned with the well-being of the younger generations who are the predominant users of TikTok. Here’s a breaking news alert for the TikTok ban crowd…. TikTok simply reflects the moral and societal breakdown already prevalent in our society, just as in film, television, and culture. Ultimately, TikTok is not the cause of it. It’s no guiltier than any other social media platform on that front. I see no outrage, for example, regarding the hardcore porn that is readily accessible on X (formerly Twitter). Any 12-year-old can type in certain keywords in X, and Voilà! – hardcore pornography magically appears. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself. And X is not alone.
The perceived (or real) ability of the CCP to swing an election using their algorithms in the TikTok app is suddenly so critical that ByteDance has very little time to divest or be banned. Americans wish Congress had had such urgency regarding the CCP when it came to other critical areas of our economy, such as agriculture and medicine, as they are about making sure the right candidate wins the next election.
