A Nation Scared Of TikTok And Balloons

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently declared that he was looking into a ban on TikTok in the United States — an idea so silly that it is both practically impossible and would result in the overthrow of the United States government if ever implemented. Of course, this has been something Senator Josh Hawley has been pushing for over the past several years — again, even though nothing about it makes any sense whatsoever.

Of course, Hawley has spent his entire time in the Senate doing nothing but hating modern technology — and social media specifically. Although Hawley claims his dislike of TikTok has to do with its ties to China — something which he has never been able to prove, I should note — but that does not explain why he has an equal hatred for all other social media platforms. Hawley spent his early years in the Senate criticizing Facebook, Twitter, and Google — even writing a book, published in 2021, called The Tyranny of Big Tech — but he has since all but dropped his talk of those platforms in favor of bashing TikTok. One has to wonder if it has something to do with the fact that Meta — the company which owns Facebook — has paid Republican politicians to attack TikTok.

Coming from somebody who has been keeping a close eye on both Senator Hawley and the TikTok controversy for several years, I must stress that I have found the claims of TikTok being a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party or a national security threat in some way to be totally without evidence. All of the data TikTok gets from United States users is routed to Oracle, which is a United States based company, and we have no evidence of either ByteTech or the Chinese government accessing it after it is secured. However, that doesn’t matter — all that is important to these politicians is that ByteTech is a Chinese company, but using this — and only this — as the basis for all the various conspiracy theories around TikTok makes about as much as saying the same about DailyMotion because it is run by a French company.

For that matter, one has to wonder if the politicians who are making this claim have thought the implications of this argument through. If TikTok cannot be trusted because it is a Chinese company, then why can’t nations ban social media websites like Twitter and Facebook under the logic that they’re nothing more than…