Flashback to 2020 when we were all locked in our houses and left alone with our devices. Adventuring through the app store to fulfill our boredom, most of us came across THEE app, TikTok. An app of entertainment, creativity, and laughter; it was practically attached to our hip. Some of the biggest influences grew from featured TikTok dances: Renegade, The Box, Outwest, Savage, etc. Now imagine the government trying to take away something of our leisure. The current idea to ban TikTok in the United States is not the right approach to address the problem of collecting data.
BACKGROUND
On March 13, 2024, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill giving Chinese owner Bytedance six months to divest the company to an American company or risk being banned in the United States. This is the biggest threat the app has faced since the Trump administration.
On August 6, 2020, former president Donald Trump issued an executive order for the app’s ban. But the U.S. District Judge Carl Nicholas shut down the order since Trump was abusing his former presidential powers.
Lawyers of TikTok showed Trump’s team’s “failure to adequately consider an obvious and reasonable alternative before banning TikTok.”
OPINION
TikTok is not the only app collecting user data. Other platforms like Google, an American-owned company, have been collecting data longer than TikTok has been in use.
The Guardian says, “Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents…. This link includes your bookmarks, emails, contacts, your Google Drive files, all of the above information, your YouTube videos, the photos you’ve taken on your phone, the businesses you’ve bought from, the products you’ve bought through Google.”
TikTok should remain accessible because users would move and become hooked on other apps. Ever since “Musical.ly” turned into TikTok in 2017 users have grown tremendously.
Tik Tok “exploded in popularity after its emergence in 2017. It quickly surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in downloads in 2018 and reported a 45% increase in monthly active users between July 2020 and July 2022.”
“It has been proven that banning or restricting a social media app would just result in users scoping the app store out to find another. For example, “India’s ban on TikTok, which resulted in a surge in platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.”
TikTok should be allowed to stay accessible because it allows free speech for its users. TikTok has become a place for over 170 million people to express themselves through dance, transition videos, restocking videos, “get ready with me” (GRWM) videos, try-on hauls, etc. The app also gives users a place to speak about whatever they want and preach to an audience of interest, whether it is a political, religious, or any other type of point that someone is trying to give expression to.
CONCLUSION
If we want to have a functioning democracy, we need to be able to speak our minds freely and have access to information. If the TikTok ban were to go through, that would threaten those core values.
