Transcript
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another DailyJim. Today is Wednesday, March 13th, 2024. And today I'm really fired up, so this is going to be a heated episode.
I want to talk about how I believe banning TikTok is political suicide.
Here in the United States, we strongly believe in freedom of speech. And while I personally am not on TikTok—partially because of my fears of Chinese government having access to data and manipulation and things like this—actually, it's one of the main reasons. I think banning it from the government before a major election is political suicide. I think it will infuriate a large percentage of the population. I think most of us don't realize how addicted we can be to our apps, to our phones. I have a friend of mine who has been using kind of a bootleg version of WhatsApp and apparently it's going to disappear and she is furious that she was going to not, no longer even use regular WhatsApp she wants to use some of the other chat platforms I'm like why and I tried to get into it and it didn't matter, because I think it's the betrayal, it's the frustration what we don't talk about.
What we haven't really talked about at all is that we went through a pandemic, and you know what helped a lot of people through the pandemic? TikTok. People went to TikTok to record videos, to watch videos, to express themselves, to connect with other people in a time that we were so disconnected, physically at least, so distanced from each other. It was a way to bring people back together. I think banning this would be so disruptive to one's purpose of trying to bring this country together, if that's what our goal is.
I think what it will take, even if it's bipartisan, even if the Republicans and Democrats, even if they all pass it, and Joe Biden signs it, or even if Biden doesn't sign it, and he throws it back to the House or Senate or whatever, and then they override the veto, I think that's going to be a big problem. Biden can still get blamed. And all it takes is Trump coming in and saying, "They all took away your voice. They took away TikTok, your pride and joy. And I'm giving it back to you. First day, I'm just going to give it back to you." That's all it takes.
Now, am I saying that keeping TikTok, there is no risk? Of course there's a risk, right? Because it's owned by another, you know, it has connections to a foreign government. And who knows what's happening? We don't have strong evidence, but we have inclinations about it. So the question I'm asking is, would we rather die by suicide and kill ourselves? Or would we have somebody else perpetuate that violence against us? I would rather have somebody else do the violence against us than us committing it to ourselves, and if we're going to stand as a country that's standing up for freedom of speech we have to, frankly, deal with the consequences of letting people speak when we don't want them to speak and how do we have those conversations instead of just getting rid of the conversation.
For me the bigger conversation is we are a global planet, we have interactions nowadays that are taking place on a global level, yet we still operate from national governments and I think we cannot resolve global conflict with national governments, it just doesn't make sense. We need to have a global government to work at that level because it's fine when Facebook and Google are American companies, but when a social media company takes off that is not American, then we get frustrated. So instead of trying to ban them, why don't we try to come together as a global society and figure out how to deal with global problems?
Banning it right now before the election? I mean, I worry that something like this might piss off a population, make a population feel more betrayed than something like reversing Roe vs. Wade. I mean, it could be at the same level, if not more. Because how many hours do people spend interacting on TikTok? How many hours have they spent making videos? How many friendships? How many laughs? How many emotions have they felt because of using TikTok? And to take away that emotional attachment?
I mean, another way to look at TikTok is it's a drug. Taking a drug away from somebody right before they have to make a decision whether they like you or not...is not, is not a good way to get people to like you. And if the goal of being elected in this country is to have people like you and trust you and believe that they, that you care care about them, taking away one of their most prized possessions is, I would say, amounts to political suicide.
So I really hope somebody in politics listens to this and rethinks their decision. Because I really worry that this decision could just simply be handing the election to Trump. And more than that, really cutting into the hearts of so many people in this country.
And I think instead of trying to take away people's ability to speak, we should speak more. We should talk more about this. We should open up and we should fight against any disinformation that we're coming. Most disinformation teaches people to be apathetic and that people don't care about them or to be angry. What if we taught people to love? What if we actually stood up and said, "You know, listen, the Chinese may be doing this, but we still care about Chinese people, whether they're doing this or not."
What if we actually stood up and talked about what we believed in instead of just trying to stop the conversations we don't believe in?
So I hope someone listens to this because I am really scared and really angry that people would think that this is a smart decision, especially before an election. .
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