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.
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 thethe 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.
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.
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