The United States Congress voted to ban Tik Tok in the United States. That bill was supposed to take place last Sunday. Whether that ban will ever be felt by the over 170 million Americans who use the app is still being negotiated. The government says it is banning Tik Tok for the company’s potential to share data with the Chinese government. The thing is this is almost certainly a lie. There is no way that the Congress that allows Apple to record our private conversations, Facebook and Amazon to take everything from location data to our search history, gives a hoot about the privacy of the American people.

Congress has had every opportunity to ban this kind of data collection in the first place and chose not to, they chose to ban one single app that so happens to fairly outcompete any similar American product. The Chinese government, and every person reading this has the opportunity to buy incredibly detailed cell phone data reports of basically any American right now, and the American company who sells this product fears not that their profit margins will be impacted by a corporate ban in the name of American privacy. The fact that this data is collected in the first place and put on the open market means, no matter what, it will fall into the hands of foreign adversaries who spend a few minutes trying to acquire it.

I feel this outlines a bigger issue with the current American free market. American mega corporations no longer must compete in the free market. That is because it is much cheaper for General Motors to lobby Congress to ban much more innovative and consumer friendly cars from other countries, than it is to innovate better cars to properly compete. This is exactly what we are seeing with the banning of Tik Tok. People like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg have positioned themselves close to power because they simply can’t control the market any other way. This represents an absolute failure from the government, and I hope this doesn’t begin a slippery slope into banning more platforms where Americans feel free to exercise their First Amendment.

For more information about how Tik Tok is a corrupting force that is taking all our data and cannot be trusted, please check any department, or member of the US government’s, official Tik Tok page.