For some time, Sunday Mornings meant that I would get up to feed Ash (he does not understand the concept of sleeping in – he is a cat who wants his breakfast) and scroll on TikTok until everyone else woke up. This morning, it meant logging in to a ton of meta push notifications, and scrolling through Tumblr instead.
One of the things that I keep seeing are people who want to insist that the TikTok ban was justified. And plain and simple – the only thing that outrages them is ByteDance and China. Meta, Alphabet, and X sell your data constantly.
Had this been about data privacy, instead of banning an app, lawmakers would have introduced comprehensive data privacy laws.
US based privacy laws are state by state, and largely they’re ineffective. GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulatory) is the EU’s data privacy regulations and they require you to opt into sharing your data. It’s why you have pop ups everywhere. US Based privacy laws follow the template that CA set, and their laws require you to opt out. As in, you are opted in from the get go, have to find the link to opt out in order to withdraw consent.
And despite more and more states having data privacy laws, they all still follow the opt-out method.
No, TikTok terrified politicians because algorithms didn’t stop anyone. Algorithms suppress videos by Black creators speaking about race? Start using codewords. Same with discussions about sexual assault, murder, genocide or even a pandemic. People found workarounds, and it angered politicians. People were sharing information, and without American control – they couldn’t force them to suppress things.
And by the by, it was Trump who started the rallying cry to ban TikTok. You can’t give him credit for saving a platform destruction when he lit the match.
I’m not sure what TikTok will return. But it’s frustrating that we still might lose what made it unique. That it could be a place to support a small business, but also a place to organize socially. And a place where there were no expectations of perfect video productions (unlike YouTube). So you had off the cuff videos, with an expectation of collaboration.
And the irony is – if TikTok was just a silly app where kids dance…. what would have been the harm in that?