Adding to TikTok’s litany of woes, the House voted overwhelmingly yesterday to prevent government employees from installing TikTok on government-issued devices—inching closer toward the transnational goal of eradicating the Chinese-owned company from the face of the earth. TikTok clapped back with the announcement that it’s going to add a ton of jobs to the U.S. economy. O0o0o0o0o.
Politico reports that the TikTok rule, proposed by Colorado Republican Congressman Ken Buck, was passed as one of several amendments to the 2021 defense spending bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. The amendment states that no employee or officer of the United States may download the app or an app from any Bytedance-owned “entity.” This comes just days after the Trump campaign launched a petition to ban TikTok in campaign ads and weeks after India banned the app altogether.
The Senate is expected to pass its own bill this week and merge with that of Congress. Buck, who will suffer the hexes of witchtok imminently, had also sponsored the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act,” a sister bill to the Senate proposal from anti-TikTok activist Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley.
“The Chinese Communist Party is using TikTok to collect massive amounts of data from American citizens and our government that could be used in a cyberattack against our republic,” Buck said in yesterday’s House session. “We must take action to protect our nation and stop the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to undermine our national security.”
To be clear, there isn’t proof, to the public’s knowledge, that the Chinese Communist Party is collecting U.S. government data, but it theoretically could, under Chinese law, if it chose to.
It seems that TikTok, after months of attacks from the House, Senate, and the Trump administration, has bided its time for such an occasion, and today it announced THIS: TikTok will add 10,000 jobs in the United States over the next three years. “These are good-paying jobs that will help us continue to build a fun and safe experience and protect our community’s privacy,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a sick comeback shared with CNN. TikTok’s owner ByteDance actually announced the same figure in April, but it wasn’t U.S.-specific.
All of these problems could be easily solved, it seems, by moving the ByteDance HQ from Beijing. For some reason, they haven’t, although the company has reportedly been thinking about it for months. Instead, the New York Times reports that they’ve sent an outfit of 35 lobbyists to Washington, stalling, maybe, while the TikTok army concocts its final plan to unseat the president.