Rebuilding Rob

Last night, at approximately 10:30 Eastern time, TikTok went dark in the United States. If you tried to open the app, you got an error message like this…

I have all kinds of mixed feelings about this. For the 170 million Americans who monetize TikTok, use it for self promotion, or even use it for plain old fun, I feel hurt.

For a country that claims to believe in a free speech, I find this ban to be entire entirely hypocritical. I understand the reasons for it. I wrote about it in a post here, but it still doesn’t mean I like it.

A lot of conspiracy theories will tell you that the reason Washington went after TikTok is that TikTok isn’t a part of the “bottom and paid for media machine“. There may be some truth to that.

I saw a meme earlier this morning that says “only in America would we ban TikTok before we ban the AR 15“. I could not agree more.

Tomorrow morning, convicted, Phil and Donald Trump get sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. That’s another story for another day, but Trump is already talking about giving TikTok an additional 90 days to divest itself from ByteDance. The problem is, TikTok shows no intention of divesting.

To me, the most perplexing thing is that many “TikTok refugees” have downloaded a social media app called Red Note. This app is written entirely in Chinese, including its terms of service. Red note is owned by a Chinese company and is almost certainly providing user information to the Chinese government – the fear that the American government had about TikTok itself. Some have said that Red Nite’s terms of service (written entirely in Mandarin, mind you )include the users agreeing to swear loyalty to the communist party. Whether or not that is true, remains to be seen, as I don’t speak or read Mandarin.

Lemon8, another potential replacement, is also owned by Byte Dance, and is also subject to the US ban.

So what now? A lot of people are talking about going back to Instagram reels or even YouTube shorts for their video fix. I don’t think either platform is set up to be monetized or allow for retail space the same way that TikTok was. The next seven days are going to be very interesting for social media in this country.

Hell, the transfer of power that’s about to take place in the United States tomorrow is going to be very interesting for the world in general.

Hang in there everybody…

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Teacher Armor and the Saturday Clearing
• The Extra Day: A Ten-Year Memory
• Of Training Wheels and Christmas Lights
• Charity Starts at Home (And I’m Back in My Childhood One)
• The Muscle of Empathy

The article “TikTok goes dark… In the US anyway “1st appeared on Rebuilding Rob