National security. Abortion. Border control.
Yet, even with all these factors cycling through the congress of our elected representatives, we land on a social media app.
The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that will ban Tiktok in the United States if the parent company, Bytedance, doesn’t give up ownership. After President Joe Biden indicated that he would sign the bill if it were to make it past Congress, both parties from the House agreed to pass the bill, and it now faces the Senate.
Dubbed the “TikTok bill,” this piece of legislation gives the president the power to ban anything he considers a “foreign adversary-controlled application.” This means any desktop application, phone app or website deemed “foreign adversary-controlled” can be immediately banned with disregard to greater judgment.
It is also not clear what a foreign adversary-controlled application is. All the bill currently does is define something owned by or from Russia, North Korea, Iran and China, which would now be deemed America’s “foreign adversaries.” The panic over these foreign adversaries is due to the belief that applications made by these countries will “weaponize” our data.
The growing national concern over American user data, its storage and usage is ironic considering that American companies – such as Facebook – have been proven to harbor user data for determining the user’s behavior. Instead of worrying about China using our data, we should be more concerned about local companies we know are using our data, too.
The bill will be flat-out ineffective, as anyone can download a free Virtual Private Network (VPN) can use it to access the app. Another piece of irony lies in the fact that the way VPN apps stay free is by using or taking your data itself. If the government is that concerned over the usage of our data, then they should look into companies and platforms that could be actively using our data with malicious intent.
This doesn’t take into account that there are countless other bills that include more important matters such as tax relief bills and border control bills. This new bill has shown that Congress’s priorities are wrong, given the more important modern-day crises in America.
