For some time now I’ve been mild­ly con­cerned that my infe­ri­or skill sets with online apps and social media trends hin­der my future devel­op­ment. News that Tik Tok may soon be banned offers one less thing for me to fret about. Whether the move will make the world a safer place is rather more doubt­ful, however.

Accord­ing to Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Michael McCaul, the social media phe­nom­e­non is “a nation­al secu­ri­ty threat”. U.S. gov­ern­ment agen­cies have been giv­en 30 days to delete Tik Tok from fed­er­al devices and systems.
Cana­da decreed gov­ern­ment-issued devices must not use Tik Tok, because it presents an “unac­cept­able risk” to pri­va­cy and security.
That seems to imply those we pay to keep our coun­tries run­ning spend at least part of their work­ing day either embar­rass­ing them­selves by mak­ing up dance rou­tines, tak­ing on idi­ot­ic  “chal­lenges” like try­ing to bal­ance on a pile of milk crates, or watch­ing peo­ple of ado­les­cent- lev­el men­tal devel­op­ment do so.
Worse still, accord­ing to Rep. McCaul: “Any­one with Tik Tok down­loaded on their device has giv­en the CCP (Com­mu­nist Par­ty of Chi­na) a back­door to all their per­son­al infor­ma­tion. It’s a spy bal­loon into their phone.”
Would that be as opposed to what Microsoft, Apple, Twit­ter, Insta­gram et al put in them?
If leg­is­la­tors feel ban­ning is the answer to spy­ware in our phones and com­put­ers, I’m hap­py to invite them to give it a go against that most annoy­ing of obvi­ous inva­sions of our pri­va­cy – cook­ies.
I sus­pect pret­ty much all of us would be delight­ed to open a web­site and not have to read vari­a­tions of: “We use cook­ies to make your expe­ri­ence of our web­sites bet­ter. By using and fur­ther nav­i­gat­ing this web­site you accept this.”
At the bot­tom of the page the above was lift­ed from was anoth­er “help­ful warn­ing”: “The HTTP cook­ie is what we cur­rent­ly use to man­age our online expe­ri­ences. It is also what some mali­cious peo­ple can use to spy on your online activ­i­ty and steal your per­son­al info.”
Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, Kasper­sky, the Russ­ian com­pa­ny which pro­vid­ed that warn­ing, is on sev­er­al watch lists.
The Ger­man Fed­er­al Office for Infor­ma­tion Secu­ri­ty (BSI), advised  against using  Kasper­sky anti-virus soft­ware lest it be exploit­ed for cyber-espi­onage or cyber attacks to aid Russia’s ongo­ing war in Ukraine.
Please note that (as is sure­ly obvi­ous by now): pizzeysperch.com has no idea how to insert cook­ies, and there­fore does not “store infor­ma­tion such as shop­ping cart con­tents, reg­is­tra­tion or login cre­den­tials, and user preferences.”
Adver­tis­ers, on the oth­er hand, use cook­ies to track user activ­i­ty across sites so they can bet­ter tar­get adverts. 
If they can instant­ly and in per­pe­tu­ity flood my com­put­er with adver­tis­ing relat­ed to my search clicks, sure­ly they can come up with an algo­rithm that remem­bers when I “Reject All” and nev­er asks me to do it again. 
That’s a form of “ban­ning” I’m will­ing to bet would find whole-heart­ed sup­port across the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal spectrum.

                         WHAT WORKS, OR NOT

Apart from bans such as no open fires in for­est areas in the dry sea­son, the effi­ca­cy of ban­ning seems questionable.
Among the more famous books banned and unbanned in the U.S. and else­where are: James Joyce’s Ulysses, The Satan­ic Vers­es, Nine­teen Eighty-Four, Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Lolita, Trop­ic of Can­cer and The Naked Lunch .
All of them are still in print, and the world hasn’t met a Sodom and Gomor­rah fate.
Nonethe­less, Pak­istani author­i­ties have tem­porar­i­ly banned Tik Tok at least four times since Octo­ber 2020, cit­ing con­cerns that the app “pro­motes immoral content”.
The Tal­iban out­lawed Tik Tok to pro­tect Afghan youth from “being mis­lead”.
Sounds right out of the “woke” and MAGA playbooks.
It’s also in keep­ing with the spir­it of one of mod­ern history’s ser­i­al ban­ning regimes, apartheid South Africa.
Between 1948 and 1991, the country’s white rulers issued ban­ning orders that severe­ly restrict­ed more than 1,600 peo­ple in an effort to silence their oppo­si­tion to apartheid and stop their polit­i­cal activity.
We saw how well that worked out, which brings to mind an old South African joke about book ban­ning in the name of morality.
A  book deal­er request­ing an import licence describes “Snow White and the Sev­en Dwarfs” to a gov­ern­ment censor.
“Are you mad?”, the cen­sor shouts. “A book for chil­dren about an unmar­ried young woman liv­ing with sev­en men. Dwarfs at that. It’s immoral. Per­ver­sion. It is here­by banned forever.”
“Okay,” the deal­er says. “Can I have a licence for the Kama Sutra?”
“Is it more per­ver­sion and immoral­i­ty?”, the cen­sor demands.
“No. More like a reli­gious exer­cise book,” the deal­er says.
“Ah,” the cen­sor replies with a smile. “Reli­gion and sport. That’s a per­fect book for South Africans to read.”
It’s also a fair mea­sure of just how ill-informed and there­fore inef­fi­cient wield­ing ban­ning as a blunt instru­ment can be.

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