Most of us here at SJCP know and love TikTok. TikTok is a fun and interactive app that provides so many opportunities to create and watch videos. Videos include dancing, lip-syncing, tutorials, challenges, and many more. TikTok users spend an average of 95 minutes per day on the app and once you start scrolling, getting lost in the videos that are placed on a page just for you is very easy. TikTok has created a great place for small businesses, charities, and other organizations to get acknowledged on a large scale. It only takes one video to go viral. Recently there has been a lot of talk about the US permanently banning TikTok due to security threats. Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned the public that ByteDance, a company that owns TikTok, could share data such as browsing history, location, and biometric identifiers with China’s authoritarian government. We did some research about both sides and we even opened a poll to our student body asking them the question, “should TikTok be banned?
For a while now the United States government, Canada, and Europe have been worried about the possibility of China using Tik Tok as a way to spy on people. Lawmakers have expressed concern over laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies, but Tik Tok has denied those allegations. This is why this potential ban is in place. We all love Tiktok because of the entertainment and opportunities to be creative, however, there is a real concern over privacy.
We opened a poll on our website to see students’ opinions on the matter and the results of the poll were quite skewed. Overall 186 students said no and 83 students said yes. Percentage-wise that is 69.14% for no and 30.86% for yes. The no’s completely dominated in this vote. Most likely because lots of students love TikTok and we do not want the app to go away.
The Viking Journal 