Comment: TikTok’s time in the US is coming to an end

US POLITICIANS AMONG ENTHUSIASTIC TIKTOK USERS

No less striking is that American politicians who harshly criticized the app were also among its most enthusiastic users.

With 5.5 million followers on TikTok, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has used the platform to appeal to younger voters. A video of Harris saying “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree” was endlessly remixed, becoming a TikTok meme.

Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has 11.2 million followers, wanted to ban the Chinese app while in office but is now promising to “save TikTok,” a goal he appears to have both to curry favor with the company’s users and to stick it to rival Facebook, which he has sharply criticized.

You can understand why some politicians might be wary now. TikTok remains incredibly popular with its users.

The percentage of U.S. adults who support a TikTok ban has fallen from 50 percent in March to 32 percent in August, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. TikTok’s shutdown could also ripple through U.S. social media platforms operating abroad, making it harder for Washington to oppose Elon Musk’s recent ban on X in Brazil, for example.

What’s more, it seems a bit absurd that U.S. policymakers are so concerned about TikTok’s potential misuse of personal data when so much of it is already available for sale online. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization based in San Francisco, has pointed out, Chinese entities could secretly buy reams of U.S. citizens’ personal data from data brokers, just as fraudsters and criminals do.

A better solution, the EFF argued, would be to limit the personal data that any company, U.S. or foreign, can collect and sell about its users. A strong federal data privacy law that protects the rights of all users might be a more effective defense than banning TikTok.