Comment by anon7000

Yeah, the ban is interesting because it’s happened before (company being forced to sell or leave), but never to a product used at this scale. There are allegedly 120M daily active users in the US alone. That’s more than a third of Americans using it every day.

While many have a love hate relationship with it, there are many who love it. I know people who aren’t too sad, because it’ll break their addiction, and others who are making really decent money as content creators on it. So generally, you’re exactly right. “Society” is not lashing back at TikTok. Maybe some are lashing back at American social media companies (eg some folks leaving Twitter and meta products).

But if we wanted to actually protect our citizens, we’d enact strong data privacy laws, where companies don’t own your data — you do. And can’t spy on you or use that data without your permission. This would solve part of the problem with TikTok.