Tik Tok be damned

Maybe we have bigger fish to fry.

 Should TikTok be banned? Beats me. I never use the app. I’m only aware of it because occasionally I’ll look out a window and see two moderately attractive people doing synchronized dance steps while a third person records it.

I assume that’s intended for TikTok. Although it could just as easily be for Facebook, or YouTube or any of the other exhibitionist apps that harvest data and persuade its users to do things they might otherwise not.

Actually, that’s pretty much the whole purpose of anything on internet, isn’t it? To influence you and to continually improve the ways in which you can be influenced.

Which is why targeting a single app seems quixotic. Yes, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company (ByteDance) and as such is required to turn over its data any time the Chinese government wants it. That doesn’t sound optimal. We’re talking 170 million American users, who could presumably be incited to vote for JFK Jr. or participate in the fun Russian Roulette Challenge (now try it with two bullets!).

People embrace and amplify a lot of strange shit they see on social media.  Problem is, they do it even when the platforms are American-owned. Russia didn’t have to buy Facebook or Twitter to use those apps to disrupt the 2016 election. Trump didn’t have to either, when he was organizing his exciting Jan. 6 coup attempt. 

This may sound cynical, but Mark Zuckerburg, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk do not spring to mind when imagining people who might wish to limit their own outsize influence. Since they or their ilk are the only ones who could afford TikTok in a forced sale, you have to wonder how much better we should feel about one of them owning it.

The TikTok thing is less about national security and more about political theater. You can tell because Montana’s Jersey-boy governor, Greg Gianforte, was right out front in efforts to ban it. Never mind that it’s like banning the ocean from a leaky rowboat; Gianforte thought it made him look like a mighty bulwark against “Communist China.” He signed the ban in May and a judge blocked it in November – noting that, among other problems, it “oversteps state power.” 

You think? Republican governors like to overstep state power. Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott defies the Supreme Court to keep stringing razor wire on the border; Florida Gov. Ron Desantis creates his own personal militia. If they can’t overstep state power, what the hell are they even doing there? Certainly not solving state problems that state voters actually care about. 

A federal ban on TikTok might make sense or it might not. Maybe stronger federal laws about data privacy would be better. But on a real list of dangers this country faces in the year ahead, that dumb TikTok app is nowhere near the top.