I don’t use TikTok and don’t really have much of an opinion on the matter myself, but I feel like the framing here is a little dinengenuous.
Point A: This is not an outright ban, which these articles seem to keep ommiting from their headlines. It mandates ByteDance sell the company OR ELSE be banned.
Point B: An app’s userbase should not be conflated with the app itself. Of course Biden’s going to try to reach a major chunk of a potential voting demographic, so obviously he’ll still use tiktok for that end, even if he’s generally against it. He’d probably prefer if they were more on instagram or whatever, but they’re not. What’s he gonna do, start yelling at the young’uns to stop using the china app so he can beg them for votes on some other platform?
Point C: TikTok, specifically, is known for collecting a wide range of telemetry data for the Chinese government. As many people in the privacy/security sector knows, the chinese government is huge on surveilance, spying, and theft of intellectual property. While I understand where people are coming from when asking that US companies also be mandated to stop surveillance, I also understand why the US government would be more concerned about a company conducting mass surveillance on behalf of a rival nation.
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