Growing up, I’ve spent most of my whole childhood being on the app “Musical.ly,” which is now TikTok. Like many people around my age, I love making videos/content, dancing, meeting new people on the app, making memories with the people you love, and expressing my true self through the content I make. Throughout the years, I’ve grown and found a supportive community where I could express myself freely and connect with people who shared the same interests as me. TikTok has been a source of joy, inspiration, and learning for me, but if Tik Tok gets banned this could be only a long lost memory to me that I won’t ever be able to relive again. There should be no ban, just a regulation or fix.
TikTok is an app that allows users to watch, create, and share short videos online. The app was launched in 2016 by the Chinese technology company ByteDance. TikTok was first called Musical.ly, a very popular app that was launched in Shanghai in 2014, but it has aged into being TikTok. Tiktok shouldn’t be banned due to privacy concerns and data collecting because other apps collect data as well as TikTok, so it wouldn’t be fair. The banning also jeopardizes people getting information from Tiktok.
TikTok shouldn’t be banned because of privacy and data concerns because other apps collect users’ data. American owned apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have been collecting data from users with no problems or threats of being banned for years. Even google collects information, and nothing has been addressed to that platform.
Stated by PBS , “Even if Congress bans TikTok, millions of apps would still collect the most intimate details about us and profit off of them, and the endless web of data brokers who buy and sell our personal data would continue to exist.”
TikTok shouldn’t be banned so that people can gather up to date information about what’s going on in the world or inform them on things they never knew. This app is a place where teens, even adults, learn how to do certain things: learn how to cook, create something, help with clothing ideas, and travel tips.
According to the Pew Research Center, a growing number of U.S. adults who use TikTok stated that they get some of their news from the app. It went up from 3% in 2020 to 14% in late 2023.
TikTok shouldn’t be banned because the people who use the app to make their money and to pay their bills by making content will be affected. TikTok has been the app that most people depend on for not just entertainment.
The apps give users an opportunity to be something in life, boost their businesses and careers. “Many of 170 million monthly active U.S. users rely on the app to generate secondary and even primary income streams. That includes 7 million small businesses that use the platform to drive growth,” according to a joint report from Oxford Economics and TikTok.
While concerns over privacy and national security are important, banning TikTok is not the answer. If TikTok were to get banned, every detail stated above would be ignored and destroyed. The app being banned might be the easiest way but not the best way; regulating it or fixing it would be the more efficient way.