President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump may have conducted their presidencies very differently, but they shared the same skepticism towards TikTok.
TikTok, a widely used social media platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has come under fire from U.S. officials in recent years over its ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
President Trump signed an executive order to separate TikTok from ByteDance, a move that was ultimately blocked by a U.S. federal court in 2020. But this year, President Biden signed the “Ban TikTok Act,” which would see ByteDance banned from U.S. app stores unless it sells TikTok to a U.S. company.
They were joined by Mike Solana, founder of Pirate Wires and chief marketing officer at Founders Fund. James Poulos He explained why he believes TikTok poses a significant threat to national security:
Though she doesn’t spend more than 10 minutes a day on TikTok, Solana says she’s grown worried by the app’s powerful repetition feature: no matter what she does, she’s greeted with ads showing images of impoverished Gaza. “The exact same ads are shown to you every day, relentlessly. You have no choice but to watch them.” Who decides which images are bombarded to American viewers? “I think this is something the government should be concerned about,” Solana says.
Social media changes how people think, he continued. “It shapes your sense of what your point of view is,” just as advertising forces you “to subconsciously look around for clues about what to believe.” “… the more people you see doing something, the more you start to feel that’s what you should do and how you should feel, even if you’re a very independent-minded person.”
To hear more from Mike Solana on AI, social media, Bitcoin and more, Full Episode He co-starred in “Zero Hour” with James Poulos.
America was convinced that technology would rule the world. But in reality, we have been hit by a catastrophe of perpetual crises, from politics and economics to the spiritual foundations of our existence. The era we grew up in has come to an end. How do we recover and start again? To find the answers, visionary author and media theorist James Poulos explores the hearts and minds of today’s top political, technological, ideological and cultural figures in “Zero Hour.” Blaze TV.
