All I want for Christmas is a TikTok ban

What do Santa Claus and the Chinese Communist Party have in common?

They both see you when you’re sleeping, and they both know when you’re awake — especially if you have communist spyware like TikTok installed on your phone.

Whether you’re a teenage girl or a government employee with a top secret clearance, TikTok wants to brainwash you and steal your secrets — maybe even both!

While spending all your time on any social media platform can’t be good for your health, TikTok in America is specifically programmed to hook its users, with documented mental health problems plaguing teenage girls. A recently viral “blackout challenge” on the platform literally resulted in kids dying while they strangled each other — or themselves.

Meanwhile in China, if you are under fourteen, the TikTok that you use is capped at forty minutes’ usage a day and floods your feed with science and pro-CCP content, according to a 60 Minutes report, which compares the Chinese version to “spinach” and its exported, Western version to “opium.”

Ironically, despite these warnings, 60 Minutes’s parent company, CBS News, refuses to change its own diet and appears addicted to TikTok with its own very active account.

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is governed by a Chinese law that requires it to share its user data with the party on demand. In spite of this obvious national security concern, Biden administration alumni, including an alum of the Pentagon, are aiding in TikTok’s US lobbying efforts.

An explosive BuzzFeed report shows that TikTok is less like Santa and more like Krampus: the mythical Alpine counterpart to Jolly St. Nick who would kidnap naughty children and take them to his lair.

Leaked audio from ByteDance shows how no user data is safe, per BuzzFeed‘s reporting. “Everything is seen in China,” a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department said. Again, just like CBS News, BuzzFeed maintains an active TikTok account of its own despite the warnings posed by its own reporting.

These problems compound what Forbes reported years ago: “If TikTok is active on your phone while you work, the app can basically read anything and everything you copy on another device: passwords, work documents, sensitive emails, financial information. Anything.”

This summer, a privacy researcher further reported that TikTok’s in-app browser even captures users’ credit card information. “TikTok iOS subscribes to every tap on any button, link, image or other component on websites rendered inside the TikTok app,” Felix Krause wrote.

With over 100 million users in America, many of whom are teenagers, the TikTok challenge will only grow. It was the internet’s most-visited site in 2021, overtaking Google — and it’s showing no signs of stopping as we close out 2022.

The clock needs to run out on TikTok. But what can be done? Donald Trump came close to banning TikTok — but much like Tom Brady with three seconds to play, TikTok came back with a vengeance.

Joe Biden even invited a slew of TikTok influencers to the White House, despite his administration banning his staff from using it on their government-issued phones. Biden’s allies on the outside, who run the pro-Biden nonprofit Building Back Together, have also launched a TikTok account, further complicating any push by the president to ban it.

The only realistic solution is to keeping pushing for a full ban. China hawks like Federal Communications commissioner Brendan Carr are taking the lead. Carr notes that it’s impossible for there to be “a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the CCP.”

But teenagers are not going to listen to the FCC — so it’s heartening to see Republicans from across the country taking concrete steps to undermine the platform.

Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts was an early leader in banning state employees from having TikTok on their phones, banning them from using it back in 2020. In recent days, Ricketts has been joined by his fellow Republican governors, including Larry Hogan, Kristi Noem and Henry McMaster, who all recently banned state employees from using the app. In announcing his ban, Hogan made it clear that state employees using TikTok poses a national security threat. “There may be no greater threat to our personal safety and our national security than the cyber vulnerabilities that support our daily lives.”

Even Democrats are acknowledging that TikTok is a problem — and that Donald Trump was right to try and ban it. Senator Mark Warner said last month that “this is not something you would normally hear me say, but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago. If your country uses Huawei, if your kids are on TikTok… the ability for China to have undue influence is a much greater challenge and a much more immediate threat than any kind of actual, armed conflict.”

Let’s be honest: TikTok is successful for a reason. When its algorithm isn’t promoting eating disorders to teenage girls, it’s providing users with an endless stream of addictive content to keep them hooked.

So, if we actually ban TikTok, where would all the TikTok influencers go? Well, in a first, an American company plagiarized from the Chinese communists: Instagram has Reels, which serves the exact same purpose and the content won’t get fed to our adversaries. Sounds like a win-win to me!

If I, as a Jew, am allowed a single Christmas wish from Santa, it would be a simple one: all I want for Christmas is for the government to step in finally ban TikTok.