To begin: my stance has been that I could support ending TikTok’s ban if, in return, it was also allowed in China. As-is, I am skeptical of a foreign government operating a social media network they consider unacceptable to their own people.
Now, I cracked a bottle of champagne to celebrate the ban taking effect—mainly from my personal dislike of the application’s “brain rot” effects on America’s youth—but I do take the bipartisan consensus in Congress at its word that there are spooky, classified reasons (likely related to the defense of Taiwan and the semiconductor industry) not to allow a geopolitical adversary the platform to send and receive data directly from one-in-three Americans. Those addicted users do not.
That, I think, is the failure of this whole endeavor. The wise, who read Forbes and felt great horror when they learned ByteDance was spying on their reporters, were not the ones who needed convincing. The teenagers and adults who had found community on the site, and the content creators who were drawing income on its back, these stakeholders were never included in the conversation. It may have been fair and even good to “nuke” that piece of shit Chinese spyware “from orbit,” but people deeply invested in a digital life in that world were unconvinced and said so plainly. In protest, they are now printing their browser histories and delivering them directly to the Chinese Embassy.
Now, Donald Trump may take political advantage from saving their favorite hobby. Would it have been so terrible to invest time and efforts to explain more clearly to the nation’s young people why these decisions were made? Perhaps by hiring influencers or celebrities or cartoon dogs as spokespeople, as anti-drug campaigns once did. Frankly, it was necessary to declassify what instigated this urgency if we were asking the public to swallow a massive shift to the digital landscape.
And that is my great agita. Our leaders may, on occasion, based on information and training, know what is best for the people. We are blessed when this is so. But we must communicate and persuade the people affected, or they will see unfairness and tyranny.
Perhaps Democratic leaders might have had a clue this would be an unpopular decision or appear hypocritical when Team Harris used TikToks to communicate a message of joy with millions of Americans. This oversight should be their shame, as whatever valid concerns were had about this application or any other in the future have become less credulous to a cohort which will begrudge and remember the 24 hours they spent without TikTok for decades. Or not, depending on how badly their long-term memories have been damaged by that nonsense.