Summary
Ahead of the 2024 election, Generation Z has sparked a trend on TikTok, “canceling out” family members’ votes by voting opposite their Trump-supporting relatives. Many young women post videos showing them voting for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, contrasting with family members supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Although Gen Z voters lean slightly toward Harris, a significant portion supports Trump. With over 47 million early votes cast, polls show a tight race, especially in key swing states.
And this is why Congress tried to ban TikTok. Making a meme to encourage voting? Evil, disgusting, how dare kids want to vote?!
Only Facebook should encourage boomers to vote in hatred and bigotry, not TikTok encouraging someone to vote who was a victim of it!
No it’s not. It’s because it, like other Chinese companies, are at risk of being browbeaten by their government into providing whatever information they have on American users to use as they wish. One can easily argue what kind of risk that actually poses, but that’s why they’re trying to ban it. Unless you have some sort of proof…
Fair point, but if they were at all actually interested in American privacy, they’d not only target TikTok. Facebook, Twitter and Google have all been actually proven to have leaked or sold user information to anyone that’ll pay (including American adversaries).
While I don’t disagree that the risk is there with TikTok, all they can bring to bear against it is speculation and what-ifs. They have concrete proof of other companies willingly doing what they’re afraid TikTok MIGHT do.
Absolutely, they should target all of them.
However, you’re ignoring the difference here; that TikTok is a Chinese company, and in that kind of system, you can’t really separate “private” companies and the CCP.
It would be trivial for China to get data from TikTok.
And guess what? If you’ve ever sold anything on TikTok, Bytedance (and the CCP) has your SSN, asking with a treasure trove of personal info! Byebye, identity!
It’s probably a mix of things, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the politicians most heavily advocating for banning it expect to get some big payout. The first I’ve heard of the TikTok ban was from Trump who was trying to coerce them to sell it to Microsoft (I expect he would’ve got some financial benefit from this). In terms of the data-collection, potentially harmful and biased algorithms, and data exfiltration by government agencies, it’s not like the U.S. companies are much better.
