EXCLUSIVE: Democrat Senator’s Campaign Manager Touts TikTok Strategy After Her Boss Voted To Ban It
'serious concerns with this company’s ties to the Chinese government'
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was forced to delete a tweet on gun control after it was roundly mocked and ridiculed online by critics on both sides of the aisles.
The official social media account of the NAACP tried to make a quip about gun control on Wednesday and faced immediate mockery.
Image Source: NAACP X account screenshot
The account was responded to legislation signed by President Joe Biden to force the parent company of TikTok to sell off the platform or shut down over Chinese spying concerns.
"A TikTok ban before gun reform is wild," the account responded on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
In fact, Biden had signed legislation imposing new gun restrictions in 2022 after a shooting in Texas and another in Buffalo, New York. Many on social media slammed the NAACP for the egregious error.
"Tweeting before googling is wild," read one response.
"What intern yall have tweeting this? There was a gun reform law signed into law by the Biden administration. The first one signed by any president in over 30 years. This isn’t that hard to find out," replied another account.
"One reason Trump may win again (and has apparently made inroads with alot of Black & Brown voters) is because too many great organizations seem more focused on Twitter clout than being honest & accurate with voters. This is such a profoundly irresponsible tweet," read another response from the left.
"Social media manager for the NAACP spreading misinformation about the administration? again, use the SAME INTERNET you are about to say dumb s*** on, to look up what you are talking about, so that you do not say dumb s***," said another angry user.
Others mocked the account for mischaracterizing the bill as a total ban on TikTok.
"A coordinated disinformation campaign by TikTok that is being parroted by influential organizations like @NAACP This further proves how easy America is to manipulate by a foreign power that controls the algorithm," read one response.
"An organization allegedly dedicated to Black empowerment advocating to strip Black Americans of their second amendment rights is also wild," said podcaster Rob Smith.
By Thursday, the NAACP deleted the misleading missive.
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With a potential TikTok ban upon us, the negative impacts of internet culture on young people’s mental health have been making the news again. I’ve noticed something weird about the discourse, though. Commenters almost always treat it like an emergent phenomenon. The way people frame it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that TikTok and Instagram are the first time we’ve witnessed a fraught relationship between mental health and kids’ internet usage.
As the Bible tells us, there is nothing new under the sun. The internet has always been tied to mental health. We’ve been through this many times before.
Emo was, in so many ways, the blueprint for what youth culture would become.
Some of the earliest virtual communities, such as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (better known as the WELL), quickly became places for people to vent about their personal lives, as Carmen Hermosillo described in her essay, “Pandora’s Vox.”
In “Life on the Screen,” an exploration of multi-user dungeons, a type of text-based online multiplayer role-playing game that was popular in the 1980s and ’90s, sociologist Sherry Turkle discussed how the MUDs had become “more real than real” for some users. Not only did they function as a “social laboratory” for people to experiment with everything from their personality to gender identity, but some role-playing games were straightforwardly therapeutic, with people working out issues as complicated as troubled parental relationships.
People who suffered from the controversial dissociative identity disorder, then known as multiple personality disorder, connected on bulletin board systems and Usenet newsgroups, planting the seeds of today’s “DID community,” which has grown on both Tumblr and TikTok. In the 1990s and 2000s, the world was introduced to “pro-anorexia,” a community of anorexics who did not wish to recover.
By the mid-2000s, the community and its perceived potential to spread sociogenic anorexia was so well known that it had already been covered by outlets like Salon and received its very own Oprah episode. And this is to say nothing of the newsgroup alt.suicide.holiday, which was heavily slammed for encouraging self-harm and suicide as opposed to acting as a support group for distressed users.
But no early digital community had an impact on kids’ and young adults’ mental health, both in the media and in the physical world, as emo did.
The popularization of emo — not the Rites of Spring or Sunny Day Real Estate variety, but the “rawr xDDD” type that found its home on MySpace and in Hot Topic — was a watershed moment in the history of youth culture. Emo was, in so many ways, the blueprint for what youth culture would become.
Emo was part music fandom, part outlet for experimenting with your sexuality and gender presentation, and part goth subculture that valued emotionality and self-expression above everything else. It was the first time a mainstream, commercialized, real-world subculture was influenced by social media and its ability to help kids share emotions and build identities online.
There’s a long history of emo and its development — enough to fill several books. But suffice to say, the Zoomer Internet wouldn’t be what it is without the Millennial internet, and the Millennial internet wouldn't be without emo.
Emo gained its foothold on websites LiveJournal, MySpace, and Tumblr (in that order) between 2003 and 2011, peaking in 2005.
What was remarkable about these websites at the time was how they empowered young people’s creative expression. Not only were they highly customizable, but they also provided a place for people to share their thoughts, and they usually shared them pseudonymously. While this wasn’t the first time people could do this, it was the first time middle- and high-schoolers did it en masse.
Imagine if you could somehow concretize your teen angst or get what today we know as “clout” from your inner, very teenage world. This wasn’t your grandmother’s teen angst: it was teen angst for sale at Hot Topic and going 100 mph on the information superhighway.
For example, sharing stories about self-harm became a significant part of the emo culture, as did — perhaps less concerningly — conversations about depression. It didn’t matter whether you were genuinely depressed or self-harmed or not. Talking about it and even flirting with actions like cutting yourself was a sign of “authenticity,” a sign that you belonged.
A study of emo social networking groups by Carla Zdanow and Bianca Wright revealed “a glorification, normalization, and acceptance of suicidal behaviors.” But it was this weird thing: It was still teen angst. It was still a group of kids who were looking for belonging.
Anecdotally, a lot of kids who talked about depression or cutting, like other kids who might have said naughty words in class to be edgy, were clearly performing. Some kids were attracted to the subculture because they were already depressed, and it provided a safe space for them to act out as they needed to.
But some kids were just angsty — neither “edgelords” nor genuinely clinically depressed — and medicalized the normal ups and downs of adolescence. Some would grow out of it; some wouldn’t because they were trapped in an awful feedback loop.
As the subculture grew, its association with depression went from a joke (or not so much of a joke) among insiders to a moral panic among parents. The moral panic surrounding emo, fueled by media outlets and concerned parents who painted the subculture as a threat to young people's well-being, thrust the issue of youth mental health into the forefront of public discourse.
It wasn’t the kooky hair or tight pants that parents were worried about; it was depression. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened (heavy metal fans might remember experiencing something similar), but it was the first time the internet was there to help muddy the waters.
After 13-year-old Hannah Bond committed suicide in the United Kingdom, the Daily Mail reported that it was the result of her obsession with “emo music.” The paper went on to describe the subculture as a “suicide cult” that encouraged self-hatred and self-harm, further reinforcing that emo kids were victims on multiple fronts: The mainstream didn’t understand them and misrepresented them; they were (allegedly) at a higher risk of suicide; and they were eternal outcasts.
For a time, emo kids were the ultimate victims, both in a real and imagined sense.
There really was an international “war on emos,” which, at least in Iraq, led to the deaths of dozens of young men who were perceived as gay because of their interest in emo. (It’s worth noting, even stateside, emo was linked with homosexuality.) Emo kids were also bullied and were the first group to bring attention to a new term: “cyberbullying.”
But the subculture was designed to attract misfits and outcasts looking for belonging while simultaneously reinforcing young people’s ideas that they were misfits and outcasts. It didn’t help that bands and stores provided a soundtrack and “merch” to help people express both.
This all culminated in heightened feelings of persecution that were taken quite seriously by several well-meaning adults, including emo bands themselves. To Write Love on Her Arms emerged as a nonprofit that spread awareness about self-harm and depression. It would ultimately help set the scene for other nonprofits, such as Dan Savage’s It Gets Better.
Of course, the irony of the way mental health and emo were discussed was that it probably didn’t prevent or mitigate any of the problems that the subculture was perceived as creating.
If anything, it’s likely that made the situation worse.
On the one hand, you had large numbers of the population medicalizing their teen angst, but on the other, because the emo persecution complex was so well known, people who were authentically suffering had their pain minimized as “attention-seeking” if they were from a more skeptical community.
It was a mess, and it’s a mess that’s still with us today in other forms.
Congress is debating a bill that would force the Chinese company that owns TikTok to either divest from the app or face a TikTok ban in America.
While the app itself has likely changed an entire generation for the worse, Glenn Beck is not a fan of the bill.
After going over the bill line by line with Chip Roy, who co-sponsored the bill, and Thomas Massie, who opposes it — Glenn says “there’s some disturbing things in there.”
One part of the bill is called “The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” which sounds good at face value but extends far beyond apps.
“Individual websites could also be seized,” Glenn says, pointing out that the term "foreign adversary" is a little vague.
“We have been accused of being controlled by Russia, Israel,” Glenn says.
Stu agrees, noting that in the section where the bill tries to define “foreign adversary,” the writers not only mention Chinese government-owned companies — or Chinese foreign nationals who report to the Chinese Communist Party — but also U.S. citizens who are “controlled by a foreign entity.”
According to the bill, a U.S. citizen could be “determined by the President to be a present threat to the National Security of the United States,” and thus in violation of the bill.
“Last year, we’ve heard ‘election deniers are a threat to our democracy.’ Vaccine deniers, Christian nationalists, climate deniers, all of these are a threat to National Security,” Glenn explains.
While those for the bill claim it would never be used against American citizens, Glenn isn’t so sure about that.
“This is all the stuff they said about the Patriot Act. It’ll never be used against you,” Glenn says, adding, “all they have to do is change the definition of extremist, and they can absolutely turn this on you.”
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For many tech critics, especially more patriotic ones, the passage of a House bill to ban TikTok is cause for celebration. However, the most critical legislation to keep America American in the digital age differs significantly. It hasn’t even been drafted yet — and if Congress keeps our eyes on the TikTok soap opera, it never will be.
To be sure, there are ample grounds for debate over the Chinese social media giant. All the big criticisms have their root in a kernel of truth or more. China really is our worst digital adversary, hoovering up far more American data than the rest of the world combined and shamelessly using information on our intimate lives and worst proclivities to map in doubtlessly rich detail the fabric of psychological, social, financial, and political vulnerabilities of ordinary citizens and public officials alike.
The truth is that many millions of Americans feel soul-sick inside the oppressive new virtual tyranny imposed by those whose response to our risk of enslavement to technology is forcing tech to enslave us to a woke religion.
TikTok isn’t just a key part of that omnivorous digital arsenal. It’s also a corrosive cultural mainline in terms of content and medium. As is well known, much of TikTok’s most recognizable content — across sex, gender, and entertainment — is the kind of stuff the average American wouldn’t want his kids touching with a 10-foot pole, much less consuming a few inches away from their faces on an infinite scroll. And thanks to the app’s algorithms, users can be shepherded with incredible speed from generic social media filler content to the hard stuff.
But the issue goes well beyond content. Those in the know understand that users can readily route around the standard bilge and enjoy some of the most edgy, hilarious, and authentic memes and s**tposts of the right-wing variety — or just relax with a host of highly aesthetic and vibey content blissfully free of any ideological coding or psychosexual manipulation.
Nevertheless, the nature of the hybrid cyber televisual medium within which TikTok works affects users, regardless of the flavor of content they consume. Zoning out on the app, seeking answers to elementary life questions on the app, starting your morning with the app, and ending your past-your-bedtime night with the app — all these things instill serious issues in users.
What’s more, it’s clear the cyber televisual medium, whether via TikTok or other social media apps, is “rewiring” users to abandon “generic” or “basic” or “normie” self-identities in favor of increasingly bespoke, obscure, and insular identities, where users’ collective lingo, behavior, imagination, and memory — to name just a few — becomes impenetrable to outsiders and erodes the broadly shared and lived-out identity that, since World War II, has been seen as absolutely essential to America’s functioning as a world-leading nation-state.
Whether or not that’s actually (or still) true, the social psychology involved in its sudden unraveling has already had dramatic consequences, exacerbating various divides among Americans that are proving easy to politicize and ideologize. That’s damaging in and of itself, but when the damage accrues to a rival like China — busy hardening its cultural unity and traditionalist discipline — in the form of increased power, the costs become dizzying. And when that damage causes Americans to forget that the ultimate harm comes in the form of obsessively interpreting identity in terms of politics instead of in terms of our relationship with God, well, it’s not hard to see why so many of us feel the digital age has been, for America, one of across-the-board free fall.
Add it all up, and it’s clear that even burning TikTok down or forcing a fire sale to an American Big Tech firm won’t cure what ails us. Unfortunately, that’s why so many citizens and officials nurse a secret despair about the magnitude of the problem. It’s too late, they believe — especially since COVID, we’ve been pushed to a point of no return. Not much more of our hard-won American way of life can be preserved beyond a few pro sports leagues, a handful of church congregations, and Buc-ee's.
Enough! This is no time for despair, especially if we’re going to accept the reality of how bad things have gotten and how far they still have to go. The truth is that many millions of Americans from all walks of life feel soul-sick inside the oppressive new virtual tyranny imposed by those whose response to our risk of enslavement to technology is forcing tech to enslave us to a woke religion.
But feeling bad is not enough to make things right. That’s why some radicalized dissenters and traditionalists look to ancient and medieval models that fuse spiritual and temporal power into a single theocratic authority. After all, that’s what today’s “left” is doing – it must be good for the gander, right? Wrong. History amply shows that whenever the state seizes the prerogatives of the church, things go from bad to worse even if church and state should ideally function in harmony (and they should, assuming neither worships and compels the worship of false gods and idols). Here in America, we must adhere to our Constitution and preserve our constitutionally guaranteed form of government, even if by further amendment.
And that’s where the most critical legislation to keep America American, both online and off, comes in. No matter how horrible TikTok is, Big Tech is in some ways even worse because it’s an integral part of the current regime’s breakneck race to become both our digital church and state. This hi-tech, uber-woke cyber theocracy is flagrantly unconstitutional by design. And the only constitutional way to stop it is with a Digital Rights Amendment — or a Digital Rights Act that works similarly — to provide explicit blanket safeguards to ensure American citizens’ ability to access and use fundamental digital tech is not infringed.
The idea is simple. In our First and Second Amendments, our federal government is expressly prevented from violating or punishing our fundamental rights to access and use foundational tools to freely speak, associate, and defend ourselves and our loved ones. The key tools the First Amendment covers are basic, general communications technologies. In the Second Amendment, they’re essential, general weapons technologies. And as we all know today, in the digital age, all technology is increasingly “dual use” — pretty much every communications technology today is also a kind of weapons technology.
Our right to access and use foundational digital tools is already implicit in the First and Second Amendments. However, due to the flagrantly unconstitutional “whole of government, whole of society” digital revolution imposed on us without a vote and consent, it is time to explicitly enshrine our implicit digital rights.
Some may fear this approach uses too broad a brush. But we know even the Bill of Rights is not immune to judicial review — far from it, in fact. And our digital rights would, of course, be restricted to human American citizens, not extended to Chinese shell companies, machine entities, or cyborgs of the future.
It’s easy to get whipsawed by the pace of unasked-for technological and political change today. But we don’t have to roll over and take it. And if Congress won’t get the message, we’ve got plenty of states to work with. As long as we hasten to work!
You might have heard about the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act this week. On social media — and even in some headlines — it’s been referred to as the “Ban TikTok” bill.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act addresses concerns regarding TikTok’s ties to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. So far, it’s gained unanimous approval from the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee. With a vote of 50 to 0, the committee advanced legislation that “would make it illegal for U.S. entities to distribute, maintain or update apps or other immersive technology owned by ByteDance.”
It wouldn’t just be cute girls who do silly dances (or trad wives who make cooking videos, as it were) who are losing their income. There would potentially be millions of small businesses and retailers who rely on TikTok as both an e-commerce platform and a valuable tool for advertisement and distribution.
It underscores bipartisan concern over the national security implications of allowing a major U.S. adversary like China access to Americans’ data through TikTok (and platforms like it). Introduced just days ago, the bill’s swift movement through the House reflects the urgency attributed to these national security concerns. It follows a history of legislative actions aimed at curbing TikTok's presence on federal devices and attempts by state legislatures to ban the app, including the RESTRICT Act last year.
TikTok has argued that the legislation, if enacted, could lead to an outright ban of the platform in the U.S., impacting its 170 million American users and almost 7,000 U.S. employees. In a post on X, the company has contended, “This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States. The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression,” warning of significant economic repercussions for users who rely on the platform for an income.
TikTok makes a salient point about the potential impact. In the last few years, it’s become a lot more than just the “dumb dancing app” it once was (and that some legislators have recently referred to it as). It’s easy to think that when TikTok warns that “creators will lose an income,” they mean influencers, but the implications of this bill would be a lot further reaching.
It wouldn’t just be cute girls who do silly dances (or trad wives who make cooking videos, as it were) who are losing their income. There would potentially be millions of small businesses and retailers who rely on TikTok as both an e-commerce platform and a valuable tool for advertisement and distribution.
It would be tantamount to Etsy or eBay and Instagram disappearing. Technically, it is possible for a small business to overcome but difficult for people who've already built a dedicated following.
If TikTok is banned as a result of this bill, would the government have any responsibility to assist these creators and retailers? Or would it be — in layman’s terms, at least — a simple case of “too bad”? Would they have to do what millions of other Americans have done as tech evolves and bubbles burst? Platforms die organically all the time, and people lose money.
Would it matter that this time, it happened due to legislation?
Even if TikTok is as bad as its critics claim, giving the government the power to arbitrarily ban apps it doesn't like could set a dangerous precedent.
Both the White House and House Republicans have countered TikTok's claims, clarifying that the bill's intent is not to ban the app outright but to ensure it does not remain under foreign control that could threaten national security. In a post on X, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) responded, “TikTok is LYING to the American people about our bill. It does not ban the app, but offers them a pathway to remain in the U.S.”
And he’s right: The bill provides a framework for TikTok to continue operating in the U.S. That framework is divesting from ByteDance, thus severing ties with China.
It’s yet to be seen if they’re willing to sell. As it stands, it sounds like they’re not.
Conservative backlash against the bipartisan RESTRICT Act is growing as some would-be supporters of the anti TikTok legislation signal concerns about the bill's scope, Politico reported Friday.
"I don't really want Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Jake Sullivan seizing my Ring camera, my Amazon Alexa devices, or my iPhone. Do you? Under the [RESTRICT Act], they have that ability," Strive Asset Management Head of Corporate Governance Justin Danhof told Fox News Channel host Rachel Campos-Duffy Saturday morning.
"There's a reason 'swamp creature' National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan endorses and supports the RESTRICT Act," he added.
The RESTRICT Act stands for "Restraining the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act."
The bipartisan RESTRICT Act, introduced earlier this month, was sponsored by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). Cosponsors in the upper chamber include 12 Democrats, 13 Republicans, and one Independent.
The legislation is commonly described as a TikTok ban designed to stop China from scooping up Americans' data. The bill reportedly contains no specific mention of Chinese-owned TikTok nor ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, however.
The RESTRICT Act contains lanaguage some legislators characterize as government overreach. Kentucky's Republican Senator Rand Paul, for example, is among its harshest critics.
"There are two main reasons why we might not want to do this: The one would be the First Amendment to the Constitution. Speech is protected whether you like it or not. The second reason would be that the Constitution actually prohibits bills of attainder," Sen. Paul said Wednesday on the Senate floor.
Paul expressed concerns that the bill's vague language is an invitation for unintended infringement on Americans' constitutionally guaranteed rights.
If passed, it would grant the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, currently Gina Raimondo, sweeping powers. The appointed Cabinet official would be empowered to "identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate ... any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respect to any property," Reason reported.
Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown also highlights a concern that the bill may criminalize virtual private networks. Sen. Warner's office denies that it would do so.
VPNs are designed to keep an internet user's digital activities private. VPNs can mask a user's I.P address or encrypt a user's internet connection, for example. Brown argues that the language used in the RESTRICT Act is vague enough that it may indeed disallow VPN use.
"The federal government wants to watch everything you do on the internet. And I mean anything: Any transaction, any search, any click, any scroll," Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters said Wednesday in an interview with South Carolina's Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
"This is garbage ... this is crazy town," Watters added.
Graham, who appears confused about to which bill Watters was referring, at first said "I don't think I support the RESTRICT Act." Graham was one of its cosponsors.
Meanwhile, other bills circulating in the House with more "teeth" than the RESTRICT Act aim to stop TikTok in a more fulsome way. They include the DATA Act and the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act, as Politico reported.
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Blame the Government for Your Allergies | 3/14/24