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In the debate about a possible ban on the popular short video app Tiktok in the USA, the Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reported to speak – on Tiktok. “I think so Tiktok banned should be? No“, the New York congresswoman said in her first and so far only video published on the platform on Friday evening.
Collect data without regulation
No social media platform has ever been banned in the US, he said Ocasio-Cortez. In her opinion, the debate misses the real problem – namely the lack of data protection in the USA. “Big social media companies are allowed to without significant regulation a lot very collect personal data“, said the politician. The USA is “one of the few industrialized countries in the world where there are no significant data protection laws”.
European GDPR as a positive example
As a counterexample, Ocasio-Cortez called the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In her opinion, the solution is not to ban individual companies, but to “actually protect Americans from this kind of outrageous data collection”.
Ocasio-Cortez is for her large online following known. By Sunday morning, her first Tiktok post had been viewed over three million times. She is also one of the few Democrats involved in the Tiktok debate break with their party line. On Wednesday, her close party friend Jamaal Bowman, also a congressman from New York, warned against “xenophobic anti-China rhetoric”.
Democrats and Republicans agree
With more than a billion users, Tiktok is the only online platform that is also successful in the West that does not come from the USA. Tiktok boss Shou Zi Chew was questioned in the US Congress on Thursday deep distrust and rejection countered.
In a hearing lasting around five hours, President Joe Biden’s Democrats and Republicans, with rare unanimity, emphasized that previous steps towards foreclosure of US data from the short video app from the Chinese parent company Bytedance weren’t enough. Tiktok rejects all allegations and emphasizes that it does not see itself as a subsidiary of a Chinese company.
