I'm an interesting case because I am an American that learned and speaks Chinese, has lived in both mainland China and Taiwan, knows the culture, and uses a couple of Chinese apps. Tik Tok, whether the international version, or 斗音 the local Chinese version, is in fact not one of them. So I have a unique perspective.
The ostensible reason for the government banning Tik Tok was the data privacy of Americans and the possibility it may be retrieved by the Chinese government. I use one Chinese app that until a year ago no American knew it existed, and until a couple of days ago very few Americans had used. As you may know, almost 1 million Americans, with many more probably soon, are joining this Chinese app as "Tik Tok refugees". I must admit it was an unexpected turn of events I didn't see coming, and probably neither did the US government, but given the reason behind the ban and the supposed backing of it by Zuckenberg's Meta, it is a most ironic one.
So now that the most massive data breach in history is underway due to this voluntary migration (if we follow the US government's premise), doesn't that nullify the reason for the ban in the first place? The data is already in Chinese servers, so Tik Tok no longer poses any danger to information that's already been handed over. The US government should just quietly drop this, right?
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