TikTok is a weird and wonderful place. Trends can completely flood For You pages for one day, and then vanish into the night as if they were never there in the first place. It’s truly impossible to be a regular user of the app without having at least five viral audios in your head at any given point.
The variety of content on there is endless, too - whether it’s programmers creating their own AI anime wives, or wholesome videos of friends meeting for the first time. Not everyone is a fan of the social media platform, however. As ComicBook reports, U.S. senator Josh Hawley has announced that he plans to introduce legislation to completely ban TikTok across the country.
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“TikTok is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives. It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health,” Hawley wrote. “Last month Congress banned it on all government devices. Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide.”
This isn’t the first time that an individual has tried to put a stop to TikTok - last year, one Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner, Brendan Carr, wrote an open letter to Apple and Google in an attempt to remove it from the App Store and Google Play Store. At the time, he claimed that “TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data”, and suggested that it should be removed for failing to comply with app store policies to protect consumer privacy and data.
At this point though, it seems unlikely anything will significantly change. TikTok is enormous, and has been downloaded over two billion times by users across the world. We'll just have to watch this space - a ban would certainly shake up the internet as we know it.