TIKTOK BANS: On
June 29, 2020, India announced that they would ban 59 Chinese apps including TikTok.
At first, many speculated that this was just a scare tactic, and that the ban wouldn’t
last that long.
But, 2.5 years later, TikTok is still banned in India, and it doesn’t seem like that
will be changing anytime soon.
Around the same time that India banned TikTok, president Donald Trump was making a lot of
commotion about banning TikTok as well.
He actually nearly succeeded given that he introduced an executive order that banned
software updates and transactions through TikTok.
This order didn’t accomplish all that much though as president Joe Biden would swifty
revoke this order after taking office.
Since then, it seemed like the whole era of TikTok fears was finally coming to an end.
More and more creators would expand to TikTok or completely switch to the platform.
And for a brief period, TikTok even became the most popular site in the world beating
out Google.com.
It very much seems that TikTok is here to stay like WhatsApp, YouTube, and Instagram.
But, more recently, it appears that TikTok fears have started to ramp up once again.
At the end of 2022, congress banned TikTok across all federally owned devices.
And since then, this ban has expanded to basically every institution that’s even vaguely related
to the government.
This includes dozens of states and public schools and colleges like the University of
Oklahoma and even UT Austin.
There’s even a push from the FCC to completely ban the app from both the Apple app store
and the Google play store.
And given that Apple didn’t hesitate to ban Fortnite a few years ago, they probably
wont hesitate to ban TikTok especially if they have government support.
But, likely the biggest threat for TikTok is the fact that both sides of Congress are
now taking this issue seriously.
In December, a democratic senator suggested that Donald Trump may have been right about
TikTok and that the sooner we bite the bullet, the better.
So, banning TikTok is no longer just a right wing talking point, and the US is by no means
the only country having these talks.
In fact, China themselves doesn’t allow the global version of TikTok to be used within
their country.
So, why is TikTok getting banned around the world?
SHADY HISTORY: Well, the answer isn’t rocket science.
The reason that TikTok is getting banned is because it’s considered a national security
threat, but if that was the case, how was TikTok able to get so large in the first place.
Why wasn’t TikTok banned right from the start or atleast much earlier than now?
Well, to answer this, we’ll have to take a look back at the origins of TikTok which
date back to 2012 when a young engineer named Zhang Yiming established a company called
ByteDance in Beijing.
ByteDance’s first app called Neihan Duanzi came out in March of 2012.
This app centered around sharing funny jokes and memes, and while seemingly harmless, there
was something much more sinister going on in the background.
Like Facebook and Google, the app was very much focused on collecting user data.
This wasn’t Zhang’s first rodeo either.
Before founding ByteDance, Zhang was developing an app that could use user data to serve them
news articles that they would be fond of.
Zhang simply modified these algorithms to work with memes and funny videos, and this
was a roaring success.
Within 6 years of launch, the app would be able to reach a whopping 200 million users.
It turns out that when you show people what they want to hear, it’s quite easy to garner
their attention.
We’ve seen a very similar phenomenon in the US which has led to the creation of echo
chambers across social media.
But, this success didn’t last all that long given that the CCP would step in.
In 2018, the CCP would ban Neihan Duanzi for being too vulgar.
And while its true that the app did circulate a bunch of dirty jokes and memes, this was
likely not the real reason for its ban.
The real reason came down to two things.
One, the app was circulating memes that poked fun at the Chinese government calling the
president Winnie the Pooh.
And two, China prefers that their citizens are generally doing productive things and
this app could not be described as productive by any stretch of the imagination.
So, that was the end of Neihan Duanzi, but ByteDance likely didn’t mind too much because
they had something much bigger in the works.
You see, two years before Neihan Duanzi got banned, ByteDance launched another app called
Douyin which is the original Chinese version of TikTok.
Initially, Douyin was widely known as the Musical.ly ripoff, but that was honestly more
of an insult given that Douyin was much more powerful that Musical.ly ever was.
The reason?
Well, Douyin was built to get users addicted.
Zhang used all of his experience from his news app and his meme app to concoct an irresistible
app.
It played into many of our primal instincts like our desire for instant gratification
and constant stimulation.
Later in 2016, Douyin would launch outside of China under the name TikTok.
About 1 year later, ByteDance would go ahead and acquire Musical.ly for $1 billion.
And shortly after, they would merge the two apps together giving rise to the TikTok that
we all know today.
BANS PHASE 1: Almost instantaneously, TikTok caught the
attention of regulators and country officials but likely not for the reason that you would
expect.
The initial concern wasn’t even national security.
The initial concern centered on the content itself.
To put it bluntly, many countries felt that TikTok encouraged braindead behavior amongst
young people.
And objectively speaking, this is true given that we would see trends like devious licks.
Some countries also felt that much of TikTok’s content was obscene, immoral, and vulgar.
And this is very much true as well given that half the content on TikTok is just thirst
traps.
At first, countries simply tried to talk common sense into people, but when this proved to
be ineffective, they started cracking down.
Some countries decided to punish those that were producing this content and make examples
out of them.
Egypt, for example, would throw five women in prison for simply making TikTok videos.
One of these women was literally arrested for telling her followers that they could
make money by working with her.
Fortunately, most countries didn’t go this far, and they simply stopped at banning the
app like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
But, wait a minute, isn’t China also not a fan of such unproductive content?
Well, yes, and that’s why they would crackdown as well, but fortunately for ByteDance, they
wouldn’t go as far as banning the app.
Instead, they simply wanted the ByteDance to reduce its addictiveness and spread more
positive productive content.
ByteDance would abide and this is what led to Douyin and TikTok becoming completely different
platforms.
While the apps’ functionality is identical, the content is radically different.
If you’re a kid in China, you’re daily usage of Douyin is limited to 40 minutes,
and all the content that your shown will center on science experiments and museums.
One social media analyst describes the difference between Douyin and TikTok as spinach vs opium.
But, TikTok wasn’t just shortening attentions and getting people arrested.
Given the insane popularity of the app, it didn’t take long for bad players to start
leveraging the platform.
In late 2019 for example, the Islamic State started using TikTok to spread their beliefs.
They posted content that showed them capturing people and even beheadings.
Around the same time, TikTok also became a breeding ground for misinformation relating
to Covid 19 and the 2020 election.
Things got so bad that TikTok had to go in and delete 340,000 videos about the 2020 election
and 50,000 videos about Covid 19.
2 years later, it doesn’t seem like things have gotten much better on TikTok.
NewsGuard found that as much as 20% of news based content on TikTok contained some form
of misinformation.
Clearly, this war against misinformation is very much ongoing, but it didn’t take long
for countries to realize that all of this unproductive content was just a singular battle,
a distraction.
The real war was the cyber war against China.
BANS PHASE 2: The idea that TikTok collects a bunch of user
data is not a theory, it’s a fact.
It’s actually blatantly specified in their privacy policy on their official website.
Here’s some of the information that they collect.
IP Address, location data, keystroke patterns, mobile carrier, and even biometric data including
faceprints and voiceprints.
They also analyze all of the videos that are posted on the platform to gather further information
about location and the people in the video.
And those are just the variables that TikTok openly admits to collecting.
In the past, TikTok has gone as far as trying to hack through Apple’s privacy policy to
collect more data.
They have also successfully bypassed Google’s security protocol.
Fortunately, Apple and Google did catch onto this, but that just goes to show how far TikTok
is willing to go.
And the reality is that if TikTok was truly just trying to serve the most relevant content
and make the most amount of money possible, they wouldn’t go to such extents because
they wouldn’t want to risk getting banned by Apple or Google and risk long term revenue.
But, given that they’re willing to risk the future of the company on collecting more
data, their intentions become a lot more shady.
And it didn’t take long for evidence to start popping up.
In August of 2022, for example, Forbes revealed that 300 current TikTok and ByteDance employees
had previously worked for Chinese state media.
While this is suspicious in its own right, the story doesn’t end there.
For obvious reasons, TikTok was not a fan of Forbes exposing this information, so they
started spying on Forbes journalists to try to identity their sources.
Ironically, Forbes would end up writing a story about this as well.
And craziest part is that TikTok didn’t even try to deny the claims.
They admitted that yes, some of their employees had been spying on Forbes journalists.
However, according to TikTok, these employees acted on their own accord and do not represent
the company’s actions.
But, you can take that for what you will.
Also, everything that we’re covering is simply public info.
Organizations like the CIA likely have a lot more dirt on TikTok.
But then, why wasn’t TikTok banned 2.5 years ago in the US along with countries like India.
Well, the answer is politics.
2.5 years ago, the 2020 election was just around the corner, and Democrats couldn’t
risk agreeing with Donald Trump as that could sway swing voters.
Also, I’m not picking on the Democratic party specifically.
If Democrats were in power and they proposed a TikTok ban, the republicans wouldn’t have
risked agreeing with the Democrats either.
The Republicans would’ve probably framed a TikTok ban as some sort of attack against
free speech.
And these party politics gave TikTok the perfect oppurtunity to double down.
It wasn’t until after Joe Biden revoked Trump’s TikTok ban that TikTok started collecting
biometric data and trying to bypass Apple’s security.
So, it looks like there’s no one to blame for TikTok’s power other than our own government.
AN INEVITABLE BAN: At this point, the evidence against TikTok
is becoming irrefutable and the midterm elections are over.
So, it looks like both sides of Congress are finally starting to take action and do what
they deem is appropriate.
This appears to include banning TikTok altogether.
So far, they’ve only banned TikTok across government organizations.
But, it’s only been one month since that starting addressing this threat, so its more
than likely that more bans and restrictions are around the corner.
And while you can argue all you want that ByteDance isn’t doing anything that American
companies already weren’t doing, the reality is that the US would rather have American
companies have this data than Chinese companies.
So, if you’re an avid TikTok user, you might wanna get used to Instagram Reels and YouTube
Shorts because the era of TikTok may soon be coming to an end.
Would you support a TikTok ban?
Comment that down below.
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