TikTok has been one of the best tools for startups and small business owners in America. I would know. I’m one of them.
After working for President Trump in the White House, I started a dating app for conservatives called The Right Stuff. To promote the app, I tried all the conventional methods: buying ads, hosting events, and doing press. This was labor-intensive, expensive, and produced minimal results. It wasn’t until I started posting satirical TikTok skits about dating that my business started taking off. In a year, we gained two million followers and over 100 million likes on the platform. Young conservatives are downloading my app and finding love. The best part is it costs us nothing.
Last month, President Biden upended the lives of over 100 million American users by signing a bill that forces TikTok to divest from its parent company or face a ban in the United States. Rather than allowing lawmakers to vote on the ban as a standalone bill, Speaker Mike Johnson and congressional Republicans jammed the bill in with $95 billion in foreign aid. The most concerning aspect of the ban is that it was based on a false national security narrative pushed by the intelligence community and Biden’s Department of Justice, who had a hand in writing the bill. Of course, Republicans fell for it.
As a TikTok creator, I decided to look into the allegations surrounding the app. If I was being manipulated by the Chinese government, I wanted to know. It turns out there’s not a single known instance of the Chinese government influencing the content on the app. And all American user data is stored here in the U.S. with Oracle, an American company. If the concern is American user data going to China, why didn’t Congress just ban that? TikTok doesn’t share our data with China, but other companies do.
Instead of taking these facts into consideration, Republicans rushed to pass a bill that grants new censorship powers to the government. Besides banning TikTok, the bill gives the President the ability to ban companies he says are acting at the direction of a foreign adversary. After all we’ve learned the last four years about how the government pressured media companies to censor legitimate speech about COVID, it boggles my mind that Republicans would vote to give President Biden new censorship powers. You don’t need a vivid imagination to see how this could be used against conservative media outlets like Fox News, which the Democrats constantly accuse of being apologists for Russia.
If Republicans voted for the ban so they can look like they’re taking on Big Tech, they’re fooling no one. They haven’t done a single thing in the last five years on the most important tech issue – the censorship of conservatives. In fact, when I was running personnel for President Trump, we rescinded the nomination of an FCC Commissioner after he contradicted Trump’s order to hold social media companies accountable. But Republican senators opposed that move because they were afraid of taking on Big Tech giants like Facebook. And now with the TikTok ban, they just delivered the biggest gift of all to Facebook: a monopoly over the entire social media industry.
The bottom line is, Republicans got played. Because they wanted to act like they’re tough on China in an election year, they gave the Biden Administration and Facebook exactly what they wanted. Now, 170 million Americans will have to pay the price for their political theater.
John McEntee is a former aide to President Trump and founder of The Right Stuff.
