Hatred of Donald Trump has more than once caused the leaders in the Democrat party to go against what is good for the country. A prime example of this is the viral video app TikTok.
In 2020, before he left office, President Trump ordered a ban on new downloads of the viral video app TikTok. He asserted that the app, owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, threatened national security.
After taking office, President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s order. Biden did this after admitting that this app can “access and capture vast swathes of information from users.”
“This data collection threatens to provide foreign adversaries with access to that information,” he said.
Today, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media apps in the United States. Especially popular with younger digital audiences it has over 90 million users in the United States.
Let’s look at why Trump wanted to ban this app. First, ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is required by Chinese law to share the data collected from the app with the Chinese Communist Party. This data includes the personal information of its users, including Internet browsing data, keystrokes and location information of the user.
According to Kurt “The CyberGuy” Knutsson, “There’s nothing that is going to stop them from getting into personal-private data that your kids are putting up on TikTok.”
With the collection of data comes power. How would Americans feel if there was a law requiring Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to turn over the data they collect to the government regularly?
In the last year, left-wing media, including the New York Times, have admitted that Trump was right about TikTok.
“TikTok’s real power isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and create. It’s over the opaque algorithm that governs what gets seen and what doesn’t,” Times’ columnist Ezra Klein wrote.
A study concluded that 10 percent of U.S. adults get their news regularly from TikTok, an increase from 3 percent in 2020.
Make no mistake. China wants to control the world. That makes them our enemy. Can you imagine President Jimmy Carter allowing NBC to be owned and run by Russia during the height of the Cold War?
That is a good analogy of what the CCP can do with TikTok and Biden allowed it to happen.
In November, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. agreed that Trump “was right” in trying to stop TikTok from being in the U.S. In an interview on Fox News Sunday Warner said, “So, if you’re a parent, and you’ve got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned. All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that it contributes to China’s status as the world’s No. 1 thief of U.S. data.
If that was not bad enough, experts tell us that the program is very addictive. The secret is its algorithm.
Longtime radio host Celeste Headlee said the social media app actually “tricks your brain” by “shooting in dopamine.”
On One Nation with Brian Kilmeade, China expert Steve Mosher said this is part of a “Massive espionage effort against the United States.”
As of December 2022, six states — Alabama, Utah, Texas, Maryland, Nebraska, and South Dakota — have banned TikTok on government devices.
Thankfully the U.S. armed forces bans the use of TikTok on it’s phones.
Missouri House Bill 919 — currently under consideration — would ban using Chinese-owned social media applications on state devices. The bill is sponsored by Adam Schnelting (R-St. Charles).
Late last year, President Biden signed Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” into law, banning TikTok on all federal government devices. Last month Hawley announced he is introducing a bill to ban the app for everyone in the U.S.
As a country, we don’t seem to learn from our mistakes when it comes to communism. We supported one of the world’s worst dictators by buying oil from Russia. Vladimir Putin then used that leverage and money to attack Ukraine.
One of agriculture’s oldest truisms is that the time to close the barn door is before the cows leave. This is what Trump tried to do. Biden and other Democrat leaders apparently never learned that lesson.
