I'm an occasional user of TikTok. When I give it a look, I enjoy what I see.
The short videos are mildly addictive. I like how easy it is to simply swipe up on my iPhone's screen and get a new entertaining video. Sometimes it's hard to stop scrolling through the endless TikTok offerings.
Tonight, though, I was greeted with this message.
This doesn't bother me much. However, all the people and businesses who rely on highly popular TikTok to publicize themselves are going to be irked. Of course, this wasn't a surprise. Last year Congress passed a bill with bipartisan support that Biden signed which has a Sunday deadline, as reported by Politico.
At midnight, it will become illegal for any company to distribute, maintain or update TikTok after the Supreme Court upheld a law forcing the app to sever ties from Beijing-based ByteDance.
TikTok was also quietly pulled off the Google and Apple app stores before Sunday. App providers risked potentially bankruptcy-inducing fines of $5,000 a day per user if they kept offering the app.
The possibility of a TikTok return will now lie with Trump, who has promised to broker a deal to save the app and is considering granting it a 90-day extension.
I won't be saying this often during the next four years, but I hope Trump succeeds in keeping his promise.
I'm on the side of those who worry more about the erosion of free speech than national data security concerns when it comes to the law requiring TikTok to stop being a Chinese-owned company if it wants to operate in the United States.
To my knowledge, there hasn't been any credible evidence that the Chinese government is using data collected by TikTok about its American users in some nefarious fashion, or even how this could occur. It just seems like Congress bought into an overblown fear of the Chinese Communist Party, especially since TikTok assured legislators that the American data is kept on servers here in the United States, not in China.
This is a bad precedent. Why should Congress stop with China? Seemingly an argument could be made that any social media platform with ties to a foreign government should be banned in this country. And when it comes to concerns about the sanctity of user data, I'm much more worried about how Facebook is handling that data than how TikTok is.
If Trump comes to the rescue of TikTok, I'll applaud him for that, regardless of his motives -- which might have something to do with the fact that a major donor to his presidential campaign has urged him to save TikTok, the campaign successfully used TikTok to reach voters, and the TikTok CEO was invited to Trump's inauguration along with other social media moguls.
Plus, Trump is eager to demonstrate that he can negotiate deals that were off limits to Biden. Saving TikTok would give Trump bonus points when he sits down with Chinese leaders to discuss issues of mutual concern.
I'm suspecting that if Trump wants Congress to undo the TikTok legislation, or at least make it more favorable to TikTok, Republicans will go along with what their Dear Leader wants. Especially since polling shows that this also is what most Americans want according to a USA Today story.
With a potential TikTok ban looming for 170 million users of the app in the United States, it begs the question: How much public support is there for the ban?
Not much.
Between March 2023 and August 2024, support for the ban decreased from 50% to 32% of Americans, according to a Pew Research Center poll released in September. Pew told USA TODAY on Wednesday that it's the most recent data available.
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