The TikTok Smokescreen
How Republicans are drowning out the Democrat message with Trump and TikTok
150 million people suddenly shut out of being able to communicate with one another, from their businesses, and from their very way of life.
This is necessary to protect our sovereign nation from the prying eyes of our greatest enemy, who is tracking every citizen's movements, locations, and daily routines.
This is the rhetoric around the potential ban of TikTok.
One side paints it as a national security issue of the highest importance. The other side declares it near authoritarian governmental overreach that is invaliding the very freedoms our nation stands for
Neither is wholly accurate.
Both sides are exaggerating the issue to an extreme. Unfortunately, this is a common practice in the current inflamed political and cultural war, that is dividing our nation in two. It is playing out exactly as Republicans hoped it would.
Yes, China owns TikTok.
Yes, TikTok collects data.
Yes, China can access that data.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and every major online social media network collect and store your data. They also package this data and sell it to anyone who wants it.
It has been shown that while technically, each data set is anonymized, so it doesn’t say exactly who it refers to, you can use as few as two data sets to cross-reference and apply all the data to specific individuals: their names, their jobs, their likes and dislikes, all of the information about their lives.
China can buy this information, just as you can. It can also scrape any public social posts, pictures, and videos to create detailed databases without a social network of its own.
Your data is not safe in modern times.
The government has taken the only necessary precautionary step: banning TikTok from government devices. However, they should also ban all social networks from government devices.
Banning TikTok from public use won’t change anything about national security.
Banning TikTok will not be the catastrophic assault on freedom of speech, social progress, and content creator income that the left claims it will be.
There are many social networks. If TikTok were banned, one of two things would happen. Either TikTok would sell itself off to divest from China, and it would be back up and running in the US in no time. Or someone would rapidly create a TikTok clone to cash in on those displaced customers.
The world would keep spinning, and America would keep operating normally if TikTok was banned.
Why is the right so focused on TikTok? Why now?
A brief history.
A Chinese company released the app musical.ly in 2014. It allowed users to lip-sync to songs and add effects.
By 2017, it had 200 million registered users. That same year, ByteDance acquired and merged it into its TikTok app.
A version of the app, which China always owned, has been around in the US since 2014. Globally, TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users. To compare:
Facebook: 2.9 billion
YouTube: 2.2 billion
Instagram: 1.4 billion
Snapchat: 750 million
Twitter: 300 million
Of that 1 billion, TikTok has 150 million American users. This does not mean that half of the US uses the app, as there are people with multiple accounts, but a large portion of the US does use it.
Before this year, there was little discussion of the scary threat of TikTok, yet suddenly, it became a top issue.
The reason is simple. Republicans need talking points.
Ever since Biden won the election, Republicans have been floundering to form a plan for their party to campaign on to get back in power.
Thanks to Trump and the ultra-MAGA politicians that follow him, the traditional guiding leadership of politicians such as Mitch McConnell was no longer in play.
Trump eviscerated these now seemingly moderate Republicans both while he was President and after he legitimately lost the 2020 election.
In their void, MAGA celebrities such as Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Jim Jordan became the issue drivers for the GOP.
They were so sure that America loved them that they expected the midterms to be a slam dunk. Winning in the midterms should have been easy. The opposition party always makes significant gains in a midterm election and even bigger gains when the economy is struggling.
Instead, the midterms were a massive defeat for Republicans.
They barely scraped by to get control of the house, and while the GOP position overall was now limited, the MAGA group had outsized power because they were not simply going to play ball with the Republican party.
They wanted it all and would get it because the margin of control was so narrow that Kevin McCarthy needed their votes to pass anything.
They are the same ones who held up McCarthy’s speakership, which took 15 rounds of voting and required him to make concessions, such as allowing a single member to call a vote to unseat him at any moment. This put him at the mercy of MAGA, and he can’t ever move against them on any issue.
The problem was that MAGA had no platform. Their only talking point was that Trump was great and the Democrats were bad.
There was no plan for the budget, education, jobs, healthcare, inflation, international strategy, gun violence, climate crisis, or anything else.
They were so busy spreading conspiracies and promising to Make America Great Again that they never made a plan for actually doing it.
McCarthy expected the debt ceiling to be his big weapon, but Biden has expertly controlled the message. Mitch McConnell was always the mastermind in those matters for talking points, but he was sidelined.
Biden crafted a solid message about helping the middle class, lowering drug prices, creating jobs, reducing the deficit, and topped it off with a major Democrat polling topic, canceling some student debt.
The thing is, some of these are easy points to refute.
The deficit declined significantly because the Covid spending measures ended, not because of any magic wand by the Democrats. The same was true of jobs. Lockdowns erased jobs, and life getting back to normal recreated them.
Student debt cancellation polls are a negative issue for Republican voters. They are mixed with centrist independents, risking losing ground in the middle.
But McCarthy and the MAGA squad weren’t deft enough to handle any of those topics well. All of them were missed opportunities that more seasoned Republicans could have worked to an advantage.
Instead, McCarthy dropped all talk of the budget and debt ceiling, seemingly either waiting for it to default and deal with that crisis or maybe hoping to come up with some spin in the 11th hour of how Republicans saved the country from catastrophe.
After trying several talking points with no real success, such as saying we shouldn’t help Ukraine defend itself against a tyrant and our enemy, MAGA found moderate success in focusing on China,
The GOP is still losing in overall messaging. Now, it has found a new solution inspired by Donald Trump: drown out everything with noise.
Trump is back in the spotlight and up to his old antics. The media can’t get enough of him, and they report on every social media message he posts and every crazy idea he suggests.
TikTok is one of the most used apps in the US, especially among younger voters who are a staple of the Democratic voting block.
Threaten that app, and a core section of the Democrat base won’t pay attention to debt and deficits, gun violence, poverty, or wages. They will yell about government infringement.
Any message that does manage to get through will be drowned out by Trump, day in and day out, from now until election day. The Republican strategy is to turn their stereo up so loud that you can’t hear anything the Democrats are saying.
Most importantly, their strategy may be starting to work.