TikTok has made its name with a seemingly endless list of challenges like Shoot in the sky, the Learn Something New and the Sound Like a Beat challenge. Some of these challenges have result in deaths or serious injuries.
Last year, a teen-age girl in Portland, Ore. was severely burned in one challenge, while children have died in the so-called blackout challenge, where users film themselves asphyxiating until they pass out, and then post it online.
As children and teens already grapple with issues of anxiety, social pressure, and depression, we cannot allow social media to further harm their physical health and mental wellbeing.
Healey
TikTok has also been passing on information to the Chinese government
In 2019, both the U.S. Army and Navy banned TikTok from all government-issued devices. Two years ago, then-President Donald Trump, who viewed the app as a national security threat, attempted to force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face expulsion from app stores.
Joe Biden’s instructed its staff to delete TikTok for security reasons
Earlier this month, TikTok said it was routing all of U.S. user traffic to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and was moving U.S. users’ private data from its own data centers in the U.S. and Singapore to Oracle cloud servers in the U.S.
We’re dedicated to earning and maintaining the trust of our community and will continue to work every day to protect our platform and provide a safe, welcoming, and enjoyable experience for our community.
TikTok
TikTok is Not Just Another Video App
TikTok doesn’t just see its users dance videos. It collects search and browsing histories, keystroke patterns, biometric identifiers, draft messages and metadata, plus it has collected the text, images, and videos that are stored on a device’s clipboard. TikTok repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users. TikTok’s pattern of misrepresentations coupled with its ownership by an entity beholden to the CCP has resulted in U.S. military branches and national security agencies banning it from government devices. Bipartisan leaders in both the Senate and House have flagged concerns.
Brendan Carr
TikTok is set to surpass 1.5 billion monthly active users this year
TikTok is a certified phenomenon as it looks to take on legacy social media titans Facebook parent Meta Platforms. Carr cited statistics that showed the TikTok app has been downloaded from the Apple and Google app stores 19 million times in the first quarter of 2022 alone.
The platform has even caught the attention of the world’s richest man. Elon Musk, Tesla’s who seemed to have concerns about the TikTok when he tweeted on June 17.
Is TikTok destroying civilization? Some people think so.
Elon Musk
How would you feel if china had access to your fingerprint or face id (depending on your phone), recordings of every keystroke you type, and access to your location history? because if you use TikTok, they do.
They’re Not worried about China. They’re just looking for more ways to control all of us. I don’t use TikTok much, but don’t like anyone trying to limit what I can and can’t do. I doubt they’re getting that much data our other social media platforms get just as much if not more.
It’s the FCC’s refusal to come down hard on apps collecting data at all. Why is Google, Facebook, etc allowed to harvest my data? If you banned that, locked that down, you wouldn’t have to worry about this.
