Silicon Valley’s Vast Data Collection Should Worry You More Than TikTok
Practically everything TikTok critics and China hawks say about the country’s data collection applies to the United States and its tech firms, too. We should be finding ways to protect privacy and free speech from governments and corporations everywhere — including our own.
TikTok US launch celebration in Los Angeles, 2018. (Joe Scarnici / Getty Images)
If a world historical crisis being mismanaged by a far-right leader weren’t bad enough, it now seems the government is coming for your beloved social media apps.
Trump’s latest gambit to distract from his monumental mismanagement of the pandemic response is a threat to ban the social media app TikTok, a video sharing service with 800 million users across several continents, many of them teens and young adults.
But Trump’s threat is more than the desperate flailing of a leader whose reelection chances are rapidly sinking. It marks the culmination of a rising, bipartisan drumbeat of hostility toward the app, both in the United States and globally.
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