I have nothing against the ban but it’s like fighting smoking by banning Camels and leaving the rest of the brands easily available. “Son, you are only 12, and I can’t have you smoking. This is terrible for your health. So no Camels from now on. Marlboros and Newports, on the other hand, go at it, little dude.”
Take Snapchat, for instance. It’s terrible for kids. Really bad. Take kids off TikTok, they’ll go on Snap. And what have we gained?
I’m leaving aside the part about “Chinese propaganda” on TikTok because it’s an argument of such extraordinary stupidity that I’m not going to address it beyond saying that we don’t need China’s help to develop the most successful propagandistic regime in history, and people who haven’t noticed that the source of the worst propaganda isn’t China are dense.
Let’s definitely ban TikTok but we have a much bigger problem. It will not be solved by government bans because there is no longer a government strong enough, not even in China. People will solve it (or not) as they see fit and can manage. Those who solve it for themselves and their children will be the cognitive elite. Those who don’t will be screwed.
It’s a very complex high-stakes project that will require a lot of individual effort over a long period of time, and most people won’t be bothered. That’s the stark reality we are hiding from amongst these boring debates about TikTok bans.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m no fan of Tiktok obviously but, given what we’ve learned from the twitter files, it seems tiktok is the only social media platform that the biden regime doesn’t have control over, so I oppose this ban.
Giving more market share to google and facebook, two companies that functionally act as democratic party subsidiaries, is so amazingly stupid. No wonder Republicans are in full support of this idea! China’s a long way from here, let’s worry about our enemies within.
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As I was saying…
https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-tiktok-was-blindsided-by-a-u-s-bill-that-could-ban-it-7201ac8b
“It was slow going until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the
ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok,
Helberg said. People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became
concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an
increase in antisemitic content posted to the app.
Anthony Goldbloom, a San Francisco-based data scientist and tech executive,
started analyzing data TikTok published in its dashboard for ad buyers showing
the number of times users watched videos with certain hashtags. He found far
more views for videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags than those with pro-Israel
hashtags. While the ratio fluctuated, he found that at times it ran 69 to 1 in favor
of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags.”
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If these weird people are looking for anti-Semitism on TikTok, they are mega dumb. It’s on every campus and all over the far left. And it’s not coming from China, that’s for sure.
Gosh, what wouldn’t American Jews do to avoid noticing how much their fellow travelers on the Left despise them.
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This will be fun watching the PRC take on the USG in its own courts over the relevance of the “takings clause” …
Politicians will virtue signal all they like when they aren’t paying for the consequences.
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