Summary
TikTok, with 170 million US users, faces a nationwide US ban starting January 19 unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform.
A court rejected ByteDance’s bid to delay the ban, forcing TikTok to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The US government cites national security concerns over data collection, while TikTok argues its US user data is stored domestically.
President Biden may grant a 90-day extension, but the decision could fall to Trump, who has opposed banning TikTok.
And thus we get to the fundamental issue behind all of the bullshit. Where do we draw the line to try and balance individual freedom and national security?
Trump has clearly been a Russian asset since at least the 1980s, yet the American people have elected him President. Twice. You trust the general public to make a determination about social media apps intentionally infusing themselves into the culture and are being leveraged by their government to undermine our country from the inside by managing content and spread?
I’ve worked with the public for 20+ years daily in various customer-facing jobs, and I barely trust the average person to just continue breathing, and that’s an involuntary body function requiring no thought. I definitely don’t trust the average person to be capable of an educated analysis of their content consumption and possible negative influence. Not that I trust the government much either, but at least there’s some people in the machine that actually know what the fuck they’re doing and talking about to try and steer the ship in the right direction.