Abstract
The American government wants to ban TikTok. TikTokers are furious and trying to fight the government, but their arguments are badly flawed and completely unfounded and ignorant, and they utterly misunderstand the actual problem, regardless of what the government says.
Background
The US government is using privacy and espionage and national-security and such as the main talking-point and excuse for banning it. That absolutely IS a problem. The CCP mandates that all Chinese companies report to the government and provide them with warrantless access to anything and everything whenever demanded. So yes, it absolutely is a problem for an app that was created by a Chinese company (ByteDance) to have access to and collect information from users (including literal CHILDREN) and funnel it to the Chinese government, and that’s when they’re not actively hacking data like with Salt Typhoon.
Premise
The arguments TikTokers are making is that the US government is bad too, so they can’t cast stones. Sure, the US government and American companies are indeed awful too. Look at the Gravy Analytics scandal that twisted the ad infrastructure to track users and sell location-data to police. But just because the American government and companies are bad doesn’t mean one should suckle the teat of the Chinese government and companies. It’s not a zero-sum game, BOTH sides can be garbage.
Moreover, while the US is trash in many, MANY ways, the US government and authorities are insidious and subtle and covert and try to hide their tyranny and authoritarianism and fascist dictatorship and such. The CPP has all of the same problems as the US government, PLUS more problems on top, including OVERT IN-YOUR-FACE tyranny and authoritarianism and fascist dictatorship.
But the true problem with TikTok isn’t privacy or data, those are already problems with pretty much all apps and websites and products and everything else. The real problem with TikTok is that it’s a dangerous, harmful, and EFFECTIVE Chinese CYBERWEAPON.
Evidence
Let’s look at the facts.
TikTok is BANNED in China. Instead, they use Douyin. What’s the difference? The usage.
On TikTok, there are three main kinds of videos that make up 99% of the content:
- TikTok “dances” which are utterly lame and not real dancing, more akin to Fortnite emotes
- Giant walls of text over the head of a person at the bottom silently pointing at it and feckless gesturing and making faces as if anybody reads it
- “Challenges”
The first two are completely useless and have zero value.
The last one is ACTIVELY HARMFUL. Let’s dive deeper and see what kinds of “challenges” are found on TikTok:
- Devious Licks: steal, vandalize, or destroy school property
- Milk-crate: make a pile of milk-crates then walk/run over it and fall off and break your back
- Tide-pod: eat laundry-detergent to get poisoned
- Penny: use a penny to short-circuit an electrical outlet to start a fire in your home or school
- Red silhouette: get naked and use a filter (that can be removed) to take a photo of you standing in a doorway with a red light (how apt
; kids did this)
- Clothes on/off: what it says on the tin – get nake (kids did this)
- Knock-out: hit someone in the back of the head hard enough to knock them unconscious (or worse) and run away like a coward
- Licking: lick stuff, eg toilet-seats, bus-floors, etc. or open food products in stores, lick it, then close it for someone to buy (during the pandemic)
- Steal a car: steal a car, especially using a USB-cable to steal a Kia/Honda after the vulnerability was discovered
- Blackout: literally choke yourself until you lose consciousness (or worse)
- NyQuil chicken: cook chicken in sedative medication (and eat it)
- Benadryl: overdose on medication (subtly decreasing…)
- Skull-breaker: knock each other down to break each other’s heads
- Fire: literally just set yourself on fire (I’m waiting for the drink-bleach, slit-your-own-throat, shoot-yourself-in-the-head challenges
)
- Cha cha: swerve your car in traffic
- Back crack: break someone’s back (tell the police you were practicing chiropractic?
)
- Salt: swallow a lethal amount of salt (literally EVERYTHING is toxic given the right dosage)
- Pee your pants: pee your pants (in public)
- Scalp-pop: yank out someone’s hair
- Inject acid: literally inject (hyaluronic) acid in yourself (what’s next, do-your-own-facelift-surgery challenge?)
- Fangs: filing teeth down to sharp fangs or filing teeth down to be even (ie, self-dentistry), exposing the nerves and causing massive pain, duh
- Nutmeg/cinnamon: swallow large amounts of nutmeg or cinnamon to poison or choke yourself
- Rate the pain: literally hurt yourself by dropping a heavy object on your foot then rate the pain
You get the gist.
Now let’s see some examples of China’s Douyin challenges:
- Learn a new instrument
- Learn a new language
- Get perfect scores on your exams
- Find a job
- Find someone to marry
- Do a science experiment
- Praise your teacher
- Solve a Rubik’s cube
And so on.
Moreover, Douyin is limited to 40 minutes per day, while TikTok has no limit and is actively designed to addict users and keep them on the app indefinitely by using an algorithm that exploits psychology, hence TikTok users watching at least 90 minutes of videos per day, and some reporting many hours (remember, these are all 5-30 second videos, not 10-30 minute videos that could be educational).
Conclusion
It’s blatantly clear that China is protecting and grooming its children while using TikTok as a cyberweapon to get the west to destroy itself so that China doesn’t even have to attack, it can just walk in and sweep the bodies away when it’s ready to Red Dawn.
The worst part is that it wouldn’t even help to create a new, American app to take TikTok’s place because the problem isn’t the app itself, it’s the USERS. The problem is that Americans are too stupid and irresponsible to use ANY app.
When I was in university, one day, I was standing around talking with some people in the dorm and hand my hand in my pocket, idly fiddling/fidgeting with my key-chain, which included a small pocketknife. I opened it and ended up cutting my finger. That wasn’t the first time that happened, but that was the last time it happened because I decided that I wasn’t responsible enough to have a knife at that time and took it off my key-chain and put it away in my desk-drawer.
We can’t say the same for Americans. We know that because their response to an attempt to ban TikTok is to download REDnote, a fully Chinese app that’s essentially the same as TikTok, but again, the for-export version of China’s own Xiaohongshu app, ie, the same old song and dance. They think they’re sticking it to the American government by using TikTok-by-another-name but literally red and with Chinese writing.
They keep harping on about “free speech” as if the government is banning TikTok to “censor” people, because of course, all those challenges that hurt the users are toootally harming the government.
(Yes, I know the title is aggressive and accusatory. So what?)