TikTok has been a safe place to post your videos and get a good laugh, but it has changed into a so-called safety concern. The crisis over a social media app with no evidence of a hack seems contrived.
Government officials were concerned because TikTok is a Chinese app, which they said was a hacking risk. If this were true, why do we still have it? The answer seems to be money-related.
Our money was/is going to a Chinese or Indonesian company not an American company, which was one cause of the ban. If it was all about safety concerns, the president and administration wouldn’t have delayed the ban for 75 days to give an American buyer an opportunity to “save” TikTok. If the app were truly dangerous, it would be gone from our phones.
There is no evidence that TikTok has been hacked. The concern over TikTok seems ludicrous when American companies can’t protect our grading system or our bank accounts, but because the company is foreign, it must be bad.
The movement for TikTok’s ban was initiated during Donald Trump’s first term when he said the app posed a threat to national security. Maybe the real reason lies in the money. Ironically, the president extended the TikTok deadline for 75 days after a ByteDance board member’s wife contributed $1.4 million to presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. Also the third largest Republican and conservative election donor, billionaire Jeff Yass, has a 15% share in TikTok. So perhaps the TikTok situation is all about the money and not about the security.
Another answer might be that the 12-hour ban was a publicity stunt so that the new administration could be seen as “saving” TikTok, which seems odd if the app were indeed a danger to our national security.
When we have to change the Powerschool passwords because the company has been hacked, meanwhile our TikTok dances are safe, it makes us wonder if security is really the issue after all.
