Just a few weeks ago, president Joe Biden signed into law a bill that could potentially ban the social media app TikTok. The law forces the Chinese parent company, Bytedance, to sell TikTok within 9 months or lose its biggest market, according to AP News. With many Americans using the app on a daily basis, does the public really agree with it or is the government’s opinion on the app isolated?
“I feel like the ban is kind of useless because it’ll be too messy to enact,” sophomore Lola Fisher said. “I also think that there are definitely more pressing issues that our government should [address] before tackling TikTok.”
Fisher has been using the app for a very long time, when it was still called Musical.ly, and the app has slowly integrated itself into her daily schedule. She uses it for an hour a day now, and considers the app invaluable for information she wants and entertainment. Whether it be funny videos, movies, or even shows, TikTok helps provide her daily entertainment. Thus, her reaction to the law is very negative, as she says that the government is violating its own laws. She says TikTok should fall under free speech, or the first amendment, because in the end it is just another variety of every other social media app. TikTok seems to agree with her opinion, as the CEO Shou Chew filed a lawsuit not long after the passing, according to The Hill.
“I feel a little sad about the ban,” sophomore Jazhira Cirilo-Reyes said. “I feel like the people who are banning TikTok don’t use it and don’t know how much it has impacted our lives.”
Reyes also started using the app a while ago, in 2019, and watches cooking recipes or general tips. She specifically highlights that lawmakers do not actually use TikTok, and they don’t know how much of an impact it has. It has such an impact because 62% of young adults use TikTok, even getting most of their information from it, according to the Pew Research Center. The hot issue over TikTok is whether it is illegally accessing American data to give to Chinese authorities and to push anti-Western videos on the “For You Page”, according to NY Times.
“It’s dumb that they’re banning it. Their reasons are the same thing they should ban other things,” senior Gavin Moberley said. “They say that TikTok steals your data and sells it to Chinese companies. However, Facebook has been repeatedly caught doing that but they just sell it to American companies.”
Moberley uses the app a lot, maybe two or three hours a day. He says the main reason why they shouldn’t ban it is because the law is hypocritical, targeting the only Chinese company. An example of this is with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, when Facebook users’ information was harvested to target them with political advertisements, according to The Guardian. It implores, according to him, what is the difference between the apps: is it just the type of owner? A recent study, however, argues that the reason TikTok is so bad according to lawmakers is that most of the data goes to various third-party websites, even when they don’t opt in, according to CNBC.
“[Tiktok] in the end has the same negatives that every social media has,” Moberley said. “They’re just Chinese.”
