Delete TikTok from your phone, not everyone else’s.
Last month, a girl from Louisiana hand-knit a purple scarf with a big pencil on it and sold it to me for $48.
She’s sold so few of these scarves that she’s had to cut the price twice, which means fewer and fewer dollars are going to her student loans from art school. I wonder how many fewer scarves she would have sold if she was limited to the population of her small, Southern town — a town which is far too hot for scarves.
If the government bans TikTok, small artists and local businesses across the globe would lose word-of-mouth and revenue, and would need to invest in more costly forms of advertising.
“TikTok provides small business owners with an opportunity to tap into what content their target audience really wants to see, without spending a lot of money in advertising,” according to America’s Small Business Development Center.
The TikTok algorithm connects its viewers with niche content and products that, in some cases, they would enjoy more than the vast majority of the population. Applications like this are what allow so many poor college students from a Walmart-centric town to dress nicely, uniquely, and ethically.
Getting rid of the app altogether and tearing down a bustling section of the American economy seems like a high price to pay when TikTok naysayers could — oh, I don’t know — simply not download TikTok.
Much like my $48 pencil scarf, TikTok is not something everyone needs to invest in. If you’re worried about your data, don’t hit “install” in the app store (best to avoid the internet as a whole, actually). If you’re worried about other people’s data, don’t you think you’re a couple decades too late?
Another criticism people lob at the app is that the platform discourages free speech. Creators get suspended or banned for promoting certain ideologies or saying certain words, which rubs a lot of Americans the wrong way. But, these are the same type of people who repost Elon Musk thanking him for saving free speech on his platform, and no one expected Twitter to evolve from its censorship phase.
If we tear down institutions without giving them due time to improve, benefit others, or even dissipate on their own, what’s the point?
