https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/13/tiktok-ban-passes-house-vote/
The House of representatives in the United States federal government has passed a bill threatening to ban the social media app called “TikTok” nationwide unless China gets rid of their stake in the company that made the app. This is because of personal information that gets extracted by TikTok, then sold and distributed to data companies and most likely the Chinese government. TikTok has been continuously under suspicion for the last several years, most notably during the Covid-19 quarantine where the app hit it’s peak popularity, for the personal data that it takes once the app is downloaded. The Chinese government owning a part of this company allows them to have access to tens, if not hundreds, of millions of U.S. citizens, and even more users worldwide. The House says that if China does not relinquish their stake in the company, TikTok will be banned worldwide.
I think that the United States passing this bill will encourage other countries worldwide to end their tolerance of the Chinese spying on their citizens openly. This will have international impacts because once the United States forces China to relinquish their stake in the app, other countries will agree and make the same threat. Knowing how China operates, i don’t believe they will take their money out of the app, which will cause other countries around the world to follow the same steps as the United States which will nearly ban the app worldwide, which would affect money that TikTok and the Chinese government have coming in, not to mention the data and information gathered by the app that the Chinese that would no longer have access to.
In class we talk about how countries don’t need to go to war to go head to head. In this case the United States is openly acknowledging the data and information being tracked by the Chinese government which is causing the rest of the world to take charge and oppose the Chinese government’s data gathering.