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, shut out from their businesses, shut out from their very way of life.
A necessary step to protect our sovereign nation from the prying eyes of our greatest enemy. An enemy tracking every one of our citizens moves, their locations, their daily routines.
This is the rhetoric around the potential ban of TikTok.
One side painting it as a national security issue of the highest importance. The other side declaring it near authoritarian governmental overreach that is invaliding the very freedoms our nation stands for
Neither is fully accurate.
Both sides are exaggerating the issue to an extreme. An unfortunately common practice in the current inflamed political and culture war dividing our nation in two. And 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, every single major online social media network and online store collects your data. They also package this data and sell it to anyone who wants to buy it.
Even you can purchase these data sets right now.
And it has been shown that while technically each data set is anonymized so it doesn’t say exactly who it is referring to, you can use as few as two data sets to cross reference and apply all the data to specific individuals. Their names, their job, their likes and dislike. All of the information about their lives.
China can simply buy this info, just as you can. They can also scrape any public social posts, pictures, and videos to make very detailed databases on their own without having a social network at their disposal.
Your data is not safe in modern times.
The government has taken the only precautionary step that was needed in this situation. TikTok is banned from government devices. They should go further and ban all social networks from government devices as well.
Banning TikTok from public use won’t change anything about national security.
And banning TikTok won’t be the catastrophic assault on freedom of speech, social progress, and content creator income that the left claims it will.
First, there are many social networks and everything you can do on TikTok you can do on other networks.
Second, if TikTok was 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 all of those displaced customers.
The world would keep spinning and America would keep operating as normal if TikTok was banned.
Why is the right so focused on TikTok? Why now?
A brief history.
There was an app in 2014, also from a company in China, named “musical.ly”. It allowed users to lip sync to songs and add effects.
By 2017 it had 200 million registered users. In that same year, it was acquired by ByteDance. The following year it was merged into their TikTok app.
So a version of the app, always owned by China, 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.
Prior to this year, there was little talk about 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 in order 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. A defining moment showing how much America actually wanted their right wing agenda.
Winning in the midterms should have been easy.
The opposition party always makes significant gains in a midterm election. 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 they were going to get it because the margin of control was so narrow that Kevin McCarthy needed their votes to pass anything.
They are the same ones that 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. He can’t ever move against them on any issue.
The problem was, MAGA had no platform. Their only talking point was that Trump was great, and Democrats were bad.
There was no plan for the budget, education, jobs, healthcare, inflation, international strategy, gun violence, climate crisis, nothing.
They were so busy spreading conspiracies and saying they were going to Make America Great Again that they never made a plan on how to actually do 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 so 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, life getting back to normal recreated them.
Student Debt cancellation polls as a negative issue with Republican voters and is mixed with centrist independents which is where the main group of swing voters sit. An easy target for gaining some 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.
So McCarthy dropped all talk of the budget and debt ceiling, seemingly either waiting for it to default and deal with that crisis, or maybe he’s hoping to come up with some spin in the 11th hour of how Republicans actually saved the country from catastrophy.
After trying a number of 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 interest with focusing on China. The balloon was a bit of a miracle that they seized on.
That amplified the small noise they had been exploring with TikTok.
The GOP is still getting beat in overall messaging. Now they’ve found their new solution. One inspired by, and utilizing, 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 makes, every crazy idea he suggests.
TikTok is one of the most used apps in the US, especially among younger voters which are a staple of the Democrat 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 to all the way through 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.