House lawmakers voted to advance a bill that would ban TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform’s parent, ByteDance, divests the company.
The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.
US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.
Tiktok has been the only massively popular social media app that hasn't censored pro-Palestinian content. I used to be against tiktok for it's ties to China, but I've been convinced it's important to maintain freedom of speech.
The "American" social media companies and data aggregators have repeatedly been caught selling your information to the CCP. The only difference is tiktok isn't selling it to them.
And yet Congress isn't going after the "American" companies, just foreign ones. It's not whataboutism to point out an action is entirely ineffective. And the real reason is to shut down competition.
So the choice is the American government having my data, which is fully committed to genocide, or the Chinese government which is speaking out against this genocide?
Right now, China is the lesser evil.
Take a page from capitalism, having competition is good for us consumers.