TikTok’s Controversial Past & Future
TikTok is a relatively new digital media that is taking the world by storm as it climbs to the top of the social media world. TikTok’s rise to popularity caused a lot of eyeballs to investigate the company behind the rapidly growing app. Interestingly enough, the United States government and President Trump were very active in the investigation and talks of banning the app in the U.S. were heavily discussed and debated. The reason behind all this discourse according to NPR, is that TikTok is owned by ByteDance which is a Chinese company, ByteDance is apparently taking personal information from users based on their algorithms, which the U.S. government is very much opposed to. Thus, President Trump and the U.S. government created an executive order to ban TikTok unless they sold the company or gave way to an American company to oversee the algorithms that are being created and construed on the U.S. citizens that utilize the app.
The National Review writes, “President Trump threatened to ban the app. But he quickly backed down from his threat, leaving room for TikTok’s acquisition by U.S. investors. His comments to the press last week summed up his thinking: “It’ll either be closed up, or they’ll sell it.””
In Trump’s executive order he proclaims, “any transactions between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and U.S. citizens will be outlawed for national security reasons.” Trump issued a 45-day period in which TikTok could figure out their end of the spectrum, meaning who or where they would sell their company to or it would get banned in the United States. Obviously, this set a fire under many U.S. companies to get the rights of the very profitable and well-known app, but this left TikTok very frustrated.
In an already chaotic and confusing story, the recent events and actions taken by TikTok make this article even more of a dramatic interaction between the government and TikTok. In an act to push back against Trump and his executive order, TikTok is filing a lawsuit against the United States government. NBC News suggests that this act by Tiktok is only a mere tactic to get more time to figure out what they will do. By filing the lawsuit, the social media platform will get the 45-day period that Trump announced in his executive order lengthened. As many U.S. companies race to get hold of the successful app, TikTok itself hopes to fend off the U.S. government and their allegations against the company.
As of now the app continues to be functioning in the United States and consistently maintains its rise in popularity worldwide. In the next few days, the story will have new twists and turns because ByteDance will announce its plan of action to the U.S. government and potentially build more problems between the two parties involved.
Now we are left with the question of, “what this story will mean for the future?”. As we continue to climb deeper and deeper into the social media era, how will human created algorithms play a role in our daily lives. The U.S. government is trying to contain the hijacking of citizens personal info, but could they be to late to the party… Certainly Facebook has been put under the microscope for allegedly rigging their algorithm, but we have never seen a foreign company manipulating data to access private information. I am nervous to see what kind of future is in store for digital media websites and how the U.S. government attempts to contain the rapidly growing technology, without infringing on a capitalist culture while protecting human rights and privacy. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
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