The timing isn’t lost on anyone.
It comes just days after TikTok finalized a sale that gave a consortium of mostly American investors control of TikTok’s business in the U.S, a deal that averted a nationwide ban of the app over national security concerns tied to its Chinese parent company.
Among the lead investors is tech firm Oracle, which is run by billionaire Larry Ellison. He’s a close ally of President Trump, whose connection to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has plagued the administration for months.
People claim the Chinese government spied on Americans in TikTok. Like, that’s probably true, but unlike America, China didn’t have legal jurisdiction over Americans, and American interests couldn’t censor anything. Obviously that couldn’t stand.
Did everybody forget the time when TikTok sent a push notification to its users telling them to call their congresspersons? The issue has never been spying, the issue is manipulation. The US oligarchs couldn’t handle another country being able to pull the strings like that.
The only people getting anywhere when calling their congressperson are billionaires.
In this case it actually pissed them off to the point that they unanimously voted to advance the ban.
I was genuinely unaware of this. What was it about?
Here you go.
Stopping this whole sale of tic tok thing. Briefly.
It seemed genuinely disconcerting to these people that youth were engaging in the political process by the officially sanctioned methods. After decades complaining about “apathetic youth”.
But that can’t be used as a post hoc rationalization for the initiative it was trying to stop. Also, it didn’t work did it. So the efficacy of this “manipulation” ability is rather questionable.
It didn’t work because people getting calls from teenagers saying they would kill themselves if the ban went through made people more worried about it, not less. Not to mention that the calls overwhelmed the system at congress to the point that it went down.
Rock the Vote has existed for decades, nobody cares about youth engaging through officially sanctioned methods.