TO BAN OR NOT TO BAN: THE LATEST TIK TOK CHALLENGE
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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4 thoughts on “TO BAN OR NOT TO BAN: THE LATEST TIK TOK CHALLENGE”
deflecting from tik tok i’ll report from
Florida where the temperatures, in public and
school libraries, are well over 451 Fahrenheit…
recent moves by the anti-everything-woke governor
desantis to ban “offensive” books is crescendoing…fellow Florida republicans-these
same folks oppose gun control, reject climate
science, don’t like food stamps and many other
social(woke) services, pass “stand your ground
laws ‑now want to ban reading which includes
“problem subjects” such as:
lgbtq themes, characters of color, mentions
of race and racism and religious minorities…
today one county banned a book which mentioned the holocaust…their reasoning?…
these books are “indoctrinating” not “educating”…these book banners live in a
non-existent world, maybe a world of their own
youngest days…a world that was conflict-free
and empty of worry…and their friends all looked the same…what the banners really
fear and don’t understand that in the world
of now children know a lot more than certainly
their grandparents and in many, many cases more than their parents…the banners are terrified their children know more about the
differences among us than they will acknowledge…
in doing so they don’t protect children.
they expose and magnify their own bigotry…
Well said Larry
I mean, you can’t even spell TikTok, so let’s go easy on smug words such as “idiotic” when humans exercise their innate propensity for play, experimentation, and adventure.
TikTok or Tik Tok? I’ve seen it spelled both ways and chose one.
I didn’t say (although mea culpa if I implied) everything on Tik Tok/TikTok is idiotic, but I think the bits of I mentioned are, which is an opinion, which you are entitled to have as well. And, I hasten to add, that as noted, comments, which includes opposing opinions, are always welcome on pizzeysperch.
Thanks for reading and I hope you keep doing so.