Growing up, I had no idea how I was going to pursue a career, especially one I loved, coming from a less privileged background. It was in high school and college, when the rise of social media apps like TikTok really took hold that I began to see the possibilities I could go after.
Like so many fellow Gen Zers, TikTok unveiled worlds I didn’t have access to through my family or friends. I understand the concerns about the app’s ownership by Chinese company ByteDance and the Chinese government’s potential for mining Americans’ data. Banning TikTok isn’t going to stop social media firms from undermining our democracy and misusing our data when American tech companies continue to have free rein.
I think that our focus on TikTok, which has helped many young people find their place in the world, and their voice, as it did for me, is misguided.
What guarantee do we have that our data or democratic interests are protected by American tech firms? Mark Zuckerberg has just gutted Meta’s fact-checking team, and Elon Musk sued California over targeting deceptive, AI-generated election content. So, I hardly think that American social media platforms have the best interests of our democracy at heart.
Meanwhile, it’s not an exaggeration to say TikTok is at least partly responsible for my career working on democracy reform. During the COVID pandemic, I stumbled across something on TikTok about voter redistricting and came to understand how it affects voting in polls and local elections. I got so interested in those issues that I found new opportunities and even landed a fellowship at the nonprofit IGNITE. Now, I have a job at an organization working to bring Latinos into the democratic fold and to see ourselves as full participants who belong and deserve to have our voices heard.
In the United States, the Latine community has always struggled to make our voices heard in American democracy. But TikTok, if anything, has helped more of us to be more powerful and continue organizing our communities. Over the last few weeks, for example, I used TikTok during the Los Angeles fires to keep up with which communities that need the most help and how best to get involved.
There are many accounts doing critical work to keep people informed, whether it’s with LA wildfire recovery efforts or the uptick in ICE raids in California’s Central Valley. Being informed and learning how I can get support to my community is crucial to me and many of my peers. We often rely on these platforms to get information on what is happening in our communities and globally.
I haven’t downloaded RedNote, the Chinese version of TikTok, but I understand why so many others are doing so. Aside from having important discourse and discussion on social media, I also love to cook and travel, and I’ve been following a lot of cooking and travel influencers on TikTok for years. I’m pleased to see they’re migrating to other apps!
It is also worth noting that much of Congress’s grilling of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in 2023 seemed to be driven by anti-Asian, anti-Chinese sentiment, and xenophobia. Many lawmakers did not even try to pronounce his name correctly, and after the hearing, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican, told reporters that Chew “should be deported immediately.”
That’s exactly the kind of anti-immigrant sentiment that farmworkers are experiencing when ICE employees show up to arrest farm workers on their way to the work — work that is imperative to upholding our country’s economy. I have been keeping up on information surrounding raids by tracking them on TikTok.
For me, as for many young people in America, the app has strengthened my engagement in democracy, not undermined it. Perhaps that’s what many in power are afraid of? Still, I don’t think it justifies banning the app. If protecting American democracy through tech is so important to Congress, when will they rein in Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg?
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