I was really rooting for TikTok.
In 2020, when the Trump administration first tried to force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or risk having it shut down, I argued that banning TikTok in the United States would do more harm than good.
If the Chinese government wanted to snoop on Americans through their smartphones, it wouldn’t have to use TikTok to do it.
It could buy troves of information from a data broker, thanks to America’s nonexistent federal data privacy laws.
And I’m still worried that banning TikTok would be a huge gift to U.S. tech giants like Meta and Google, which own TikTok’s largest competitors — Facebook, Instagram and YouTube — further entrenching winners in a market that already has too little competition.
Persons:
Trump, I’m, snoop
Organizations:
Meta, Google, Facebook, YouTube
Locations:
United States