Time keeps on TikTok’ing, govt. keeps punching down

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As the two or three of you who read my scrawlings know, I’m something of a Luddite.

Keeping up with all that is new and shiny in terms of tech is not my cup of whiskey, and I do not care if that makes me a bad 21st century citizen. I do not own a current cell phone, and the one I do own cannot accommodate any applications, or “apps,” as the attention-deficit culture calls them. So, you’d likely not expect me to be too worked-up over the temporary TikTok ban. Quite the contrary: it infuriates me.

What has been sold to us peons by the high and mighty ruling class as a way to fight the CCP is utter nonsense. It is all about control, plain and simple.

As I have written in this space before, our government’s descent into full-blown “Idiocracy” has been fascinating to watch from afar, but also infurating, if not unsurprising. The recent ban, then unbanning, of TikTok might just be one of the most profoundly stupid demonstrations by our governing body in recent history.

I know about as much pertaining to trends in contemporary fashion as I do about TikTok, which is to say, barely a scintilla.

I do know, however, that I have a co-worker who gets great joy out of the interesting dispatches she discovers on the platform, and loves sharing these findings with me. I also know several creators who utilize TikTok to generate significant portions of their incomes.

President Donald Trump, once sworn in, signed an executive order giving a delay to the ban, which is odd when one considers the order he signed in 2020 that described TikTok as a threat to national security and calling for its head on the chopping block.

At the heart of the matter is the idea that China is using the platform to spy on Americans, however, officials have admitted they have no actual evidence to support this notion. Of course, going back to that idea of control, there are admissions that officials aren’t too keen on what people are using the platform to say about the Israel-Gaza war.

Users who were briefly greeted with a message that TikTok is not available in the United States likely had a great deal of their joy taken away earlier in the week, whether they use the platform to make statements that some gub’mint nanny state nincompoops disaprove of, or if they just use it to find makeup tutorials. Apparently, one Wisconsin 19-year-old man went so far as to set fire to his congressman’s office, allegedly upset over the ban.

In a news release, Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) cited the First Amendment issues at stake with the TikTok pandemonium.

“It’s particularly ironic that the Supreme Court is upholding the ban on national security grounds when both the incoming and outgoing presidents are backtracking from their prior support of the ban. Are they implying that neither administration cares about national security? It appears this ban was a political stunt that the Biden administration didn’t expect would ever become law. But now it has, and it might not even be enforced. All we might be left with at the end of the day is a Supreme Court opinion that weakens First Amendment freedoms on the internet,” Stern wrote.

With the future of TikTok on tenuous ground, at best, with an estimated 170 million American users waiting to see whether the platform will find salvation from Trump and/or an American buyer, it’s certain that this sort of scenario will play out again. Legislators who are remiss in actual leadership will keep punching down to constituents.

The United States does not have a comprehensive data privacy law, which could have more effectively handled any concerns with TikTok (or any other social media platform) than a ridiculous ban.

But then again, maybe I should just kick back and be glad the Big Gub’mint is protecting me from funny cat videos and silly dance clips.

TikTok ban, big government, Trump