Since TikTok is going away, there’s one more secret I feel I must share with you…I never believed that the app was going to get banned.
Many other ULM students did not think the U.S. government would ban TikTok.
Senior pre-pharmacy major Katelyn Smith figured that the U.S. government’s TikTok ban would not occur since multiple companies showed interest in buying the app.
“When the ban actually happened, I was surprised because I was with my boyfriend and his friends when TikTok shut down, as we had all just been talking about it beforehand,” Smith said. “When the app reappeared not even 24 hours later, I was not surprised.”
Senior biology major Agnes Ugokwe did not pay much attention to the ban due to the government’s repeated empty threats to do so.
“Every year, there is talk of banning TikTok and getting really close to actually following through with it only to throw some extension on it happens often. I did not think the app would actually be banned,” Ugokwe said.
Since its merger with its competitor Musical.ly in 2017, TikTok transformed from a niche app popular among teens into a global trendsetter. However, U.S. officials have also considered it a potential national security threat.
According to Britannica, “regulators around the world have expressed privacy, safety and security concerns about TikTok.” Specifically, government officials fear that the app could share sensitive user data with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
However, TikTok poses no greater threat than American-owned social media platforms that also collect and sell user data.
The Washington Post and Pellaeon Lin, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, examined TikTok independently. They concluded that TikTok “does not appear to collect any more data than your typical mainstream social network.” In fact, their research showed that Facebook and Google collect more personal data than TikTok does.
The U.S. government purposely ignores the fact that big tech companies exploit personal information from its users for gain and instead focuses on criminalizing TikTok
Banning TikTok is not only an invasion of rights and a blatant show of xenophobia, but it also destroys job opportunities for Americans who run small businesses. Many small businesses rely solely on TikTok to promote their company and gain revenue.
The U.S. government has more important issues to solve than an app people use to create and share short videos. For example, the government can focus on fixing itself before worrying about what the Chinese government will gain from me watching cute clips of dogs.