TikTok? Time’s up.
Did you know the Chinese company that invented TikTok chose that name because it would be ubiquitous, and easy to say, in just about any language? They wanted their social media platform to spread around the world like a virus, and it has.
It makes Covid-19 look like a slacker.
From nothing, really, in early 2016, to more than 1.5 billion global users in early 2022. An estimated worth of more than US$50 billion. And, according to Pew Research Center, 70% of American teenagers use it regularly — and one in six of them use it “almost constantly.”
The tech elflords have appropriated the word “viral,” and they are super-duper proud when one of their puerile products gets called that: “viral.” But TikTok really is like a virus. And we now need a vaccine.
We need to ban TikTok.
India has. So has Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and — tellingly — China itself. Nearly 20 American states have prohibited TikTok use by government agencies, employees, and contractors using the app on government-issued devices. More plan to do so.
Some of the bans have to do with morality — because TikTok has been credibly linked to child pornography, and it has made superstars out of the likes of Jenny Popach, a 15-year-old Floridian who wears string bikinis, posts hyper-sexualized content, and has amassed seven million followers, many of them adult males.
That’s bad enough, of course. But the principal reason Canada needs to ban TikTok — as Donald Trump’s administration was readying to do, before the 2020 presidential race interfered — is because TikTok is now a willing apparatus of the People’s Republic of China.
It wasn’t always thus. When a Chinese entrepreneur cooked up his TikTok idea a few years back, the app was designed to target teenagers with short videos and accompanying music clips. Harmless stuff, mostly.
And then, Xi Jinping commenced reforming China, and slamming shut the doors it had opened to Western-style capitalism. Under Xi, the Chinese dictatorship has slapped chains on the country’s burgeoning tech sector — disappearing the founder of Alibaba, killing the I.P.O. of a Chinese version of Uber, and then passing the twin “Cybersecurity Law” and “National Intelligence Law” in 2017.
Those statutes make clear why TikTok is a real and manifest threat to democratic nations like Canada, where China has interfered with our elections and set up secret police agencies across the country. The 2017 laws declare that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work.”
“Shall assist state intelligence.” That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?
And the new laws, as TikTok discovered the hard way, applied to it, too. TikTok has tens of thousands of employees — and the new laws targeting the tech sector required any of them with more than three employees to form a Communist Party cell, which then reports its doings to the Chinese regime.
Thereafter, Xi’s censors quickly shut down TikTok content that, they said, “caused a negative impact on public opinion online.” Did TikTok’s founder object? Not a chance. He published a grovelling apology.
“As a start-up company developing rapidly in the wake of the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party,” he wrote, “we profoundly understand that our rapid development was an opportunity afforded us by this great era … I am grateful for the support of the government.”
And the government shortly thereafter took an actual ownership stake in the TikTok empire, which seems almost gratuitous: everyone already knew who was calling the shots, by then.
So, now, TikTok — with seven million users in Canada, and a projected ten million users by next year — is busily collecting information on those who use it, and dutifully turning over same to the Chinese government, to which it is — as noted — “grateful.” It now suppresses content about protests in Hong Kong, Black Lives Matter and the state-sanctioned genocide against the Uyghurs in China, among other things.
And, contrary to what TikTok and its army of lobbyists have previously claimed, BuzzFeed has now published leaked audio of internal company meetings showing TikTok routinely shares private user information within China, including the physical location of users in the West and their political leanings.
I don’t regularly check my kids’ phones, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t all have, and use, TikTok. Perhaps you have downloaded it, too — to see what the fuss is all about, or to have a laugh about some ostensibly funny, innocuous videos.
Well, congratulations. You now have fans in the People’s Republic of China.
And they are watching you.
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