For a while now TikTok has been threatened to be banned in the US. The owner, Zhang Yiming, has been denying the allegations that China is stealing your information. Although the company that owns Tiktok is located in China, Zhang Yiming is not Chinese, he is Singaporean. When Tiktok was going to get banned a while ago, Yiming was often asked if he was Chinese. Each time he said no, saying he served for Singapore and has always been a citizen there, always living there, and never even applied for a different citizenship.
Just recently the bill passed the House of Representatives. This is the first step to completely banning TikTok. Some representatives said that they just wanted to make it better, but in the end, it did pass the House. It will now move to what will effectively be the last stage to banning the app, the Senate. With 2 representatives from each state, only 100 people made this decision. Although it was expected to pass in the House it will be significantly harder in the Senate. The Senate says that they will undergo a much deeper investigation of the app. Even if it does pass in the Senate, current President Joe Biden will have to sign it. But, he has already stated if it comes to his desk he will sign it. To keep TikTok running, the Chinese parent company ByteDance would need to sell to an American buyer in as little as six months.
Even though some argue this is only one part and TikTok is used elsewhere, the US makes up the most on the app, and if the US all left then there would be much less on the app to watch and many others outside of the country would stop using it. Which would lead to the collapse of TikTok.On TikTok itself, the creator made a post. He said this allegation is completely false and that “we have invested to keep your data safe and our platform free from outside manipulation.” TikTok is also trying to stop the ban by getting people to call their senate and try to convince them otherwise. On Tiktok if you search “Tiktok ban” it will conveniently let you simply type in your zip code and let you call your senate in just one click.
Many small creators and large graders on TikTok are very upset about this. Many people rely on TikTok as their job to make money. Some believe that rich people like Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk will buy TikTok, but it might not be so. Elon Musk’s current net worth is only 191.8 Billion, now even though that is a very large amount of money, TikTok is worth about 100 Billion, so, even though he does have enough money for it. That doesn’t mean he will buy it as it will cut his money more than in half. Also, if he does buy it, people might start liking it less like what happened with Twitter, a.k.a. X.
Some people are saying that they could just use the VPN and other countries use TikTok. But the issue with this is that using a VPN in other countries can be laggy and if everyone does it, it will be very slow.
