Why is the US government trying to ban TikTok?
The US government is threatening to ban TikTok – but if the ban goes ahead, the implications go far beyond just the one app.
The bill being discussed, the RESTRICT act, isn’t just about TikTok. Journalists at Motherboard have described the language of the bill as “insanely broad”, and suggested that, if passed, it could impact the use of other social networks, as well as VPNs. So is this about national security, or is it simply about crushing the competition?
“With a hundred million Americans daily, on an average of 90 minutes a day, this is an issue. I imagine most of you would like your networks to get 90 minutes a day from 100 million americans.”
It’s important to know that banning TikTok might protect your data from being collected by the Chinese government…but it doesn’t protect your data from being collected by Facebook, Instagram, or any other US based service
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “The United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that has no significant data or privacy protection laws on the books.”
What it will do is take the idea of the internet as a tool of global connection, and scrap it, erecting digital borders that may be hard to cross.