TikTok should be banned because it’s posing a threat to national security and privacy

Mahnoor Ahmad, Editor-in-Chief

TikTok might be banned because of national security concerns since ByteDance is a Chinese company that owns TikTok. A few months ago only government devices were required to wipe TikTok off their phones, but now the committees are trying to ban TikTok nationwide.

Some believe TikTok should be banned because China might have access to everyone’s location and there are laws that secretly demand China to share information with their government. The United States government is also worried that people will use Tiktok’s content recommendations for misinformation. Many believe that TikTok poses an immediate threat.

Some Republicans conducted an experiment to see which content U.S. children see versus the content that Chinese children see. They found that Chinese children are exposed to educational content that allows them to expand their knowledge, while U.S. children are exposed to “filth” and inappropriate content that a child shouldn’t be seeing.

ByteDance claims that anyone who raises a question about TikTok is racist, and Republican Tucker Carlson believes it’s not since much of the news and advertisements are pushed out by TikTok.

The act that congress is trying to pass right now is the “Restrict Act”, with the purpose to restrict certain transactions between people in the United States and foreign adversaries.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy believes the “last administration had it right” when they tried to get an American company to buy TikTok from China to keep it in America. He believes that TikTok must be changed as it currently stands today in order to protect the American people.

The main support for TikTok’s ban is because a Chinese company owns it and poses a threat to national security.