Why are they banning TikTok?

Eighty-five million citizens use TikTok daily.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
28 December 2022 Wednesday 16:44
15 Reads
Why are they banning TikTok?

Eighty-five million citizens use TikTok daily. The Chinese platform has perfected an algorithm that guesses your tastes and your perceptual rhythm until it becomes addictive.

The app has made a fool of Zuckerberg's failed Facebook metaverse attempt and seriously worries Google (Alphabet) about its ability to replace it as a gateway to the web. But... Ban it? Just because of his immense success and his promising future?

Let's recap: we said CHINA platform and therein lies your problem. The US intelligence services deem a risk to their national security and ours, as their NATO allies, that the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, operates under the jurisdiction of Beijing, which obliges its companies to share all data with the state.

For this reason, last Friday the US Congress approved, camouflaged among budget laws of 1.7 trillion dollars of public investment, a measure of geopolitical scope, which anticipates other restrictions that will undoubtedly affect us soon: the prohibition of use TikTok on the thousands of mobile phones in your Administration.

TikTok's first enemy was President Trump, who has already started a smear campaign with which he wanted to force the sale of the popular brand to American investors. His Republican rival in the primaries, Marco Rubio, tried to restrict the use of the platform, which Republicans and Democrats have now agreed to ban their officials at the risk of compromised data becoming controlled by the Chinese government.

But why don't they forbid it completely? The answer highlights the paradoxes of China's decoupling of the world economy: because 60% of ByteDance is in the hands of US funds such as Fidelity and Black Rock. The TikTok case is the touchstone of that disengagement.

At the moment, Apple has already announced that it will take a large part of the production it currently carries out in China to Vietnam.