What the heck is TikTok?
If you think the answer is the soothing sound that comes out of your grandfather clock, you are technically correct but that TikTok noise you hear everywhere else these days has nothing to do with the clock ticking away in your hallway.
It has to do with the 150 million Americans of all ages who are spending an average of 11 minutes every time they go on this skyrocketing media platform and they do it an average of eight times a day...A DAY.. for a total of almost 90 minutes and almost 20% of all Americans are doing this.
Feeling left out? Well if you are over the age of 50, only 11% of you are engaged and while you’re talking to the folks around you, about 20% of the rest of the U.S. population is sticking its solitary noses into its hand-held phone doing whatever they do on this platform. Twentyfi ve percent are between 10 and 19 years old and about 20% of those between 20 and 49 are doing the same.
So why do some politicians want to ban this popular past time which seems to have captured a good chuck of the American public, many of whom, can’t live with out it? (The stats show about 5% are addicted.)
The U.S. House of Representatives took a bi-partisan vote, and these days that in an of itself is news, to outlaw the platform which is operated by a Chinese company which many believe is linked to the Communist Party. Which in turn is allegedly sifting the wealth of consumer data on every American who is logging on.
And using that data to do what, you might ask?
Well the folks in Washington who get paid to keep the country safe suggest TikTok is a huge security risk cause the Commies are mining information to disrupt American life and spread division which, last time anyone checked, was already a huge problem. The owners of the platform told Congress they are not doing the dirty work for the government that oversees their business.
Back home in this neck of the woods, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is an avid user and she concedes there is a risk but by the same token she has concluded that there are just too many darn people on this platform that, “we can not communicate with...even though it creates a lot of needs for security.”
Last December when she took her first dive into the TikTok controversy, she noted, “we need some federal action when it comes to insuring the integrity of all these platforms.”
She got it with the recent Congressional vote, but the U.S. Senate at this read appears to be talking a slow boat to China to act on the ban.
All this mucking around with a potential prohibition has stirred some of the 50 million of your fellow country men, 40% of whom use it daily, and country women at 60% usage, who are threatening to vote against anybody who dares block this service.
Ouch.
In this election year, that has lots of officer seekers staying awake at night pondering what to do: Help insulate the Mother Land from a supposed invisible Communist social media invasion or turn a blind eye to the security stuff and ignore the ban and save your job?
The governor, who is not up for reelection, was asked what she would do if the feds take the Tik out of Tok?
“Obviously if the Congress moves forward, I don’t think that that’s a bad thing necessarily and will always abide by whatever the law is,” she asserts.
On that one she may find herself in the minority.
