If Tombstone in Arizona was considered one of the most feared places of all wild, wild West towns of the 1800s because of so much lawlessness and gunfights, the worldwide web’s version may be the immensely popular video app TikTok.
There’s just anything and everything in this social media platform. In recent weeks, it was Ground Zero for an orchestrated attack against a beauty queen-turned-social-media personality spewed by “influencers” and “content creators” paid, she said, precisely to create fake news about her. These young trolls have confessed to the crime.
This is the reason many countries have decided to ban or regulate TikTok, citing threats to their national interests. These countries include the United States, India, the European Union, Canada, Australia, Afghanistan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Indonesia and Pakistan, according to news reports. The point was to prevent TikTok from sending data to the Chinese government.TikTok of course has denied all allegations.
Are the perceived threats to national security and data privacy valid? Should the Philippine government ban or regulate the app, too? Perhaps the government can look into the matter, considering that other countries have implemented their own, respective ban against the app to prevent local data collected by TikTok to be sent to the Chinese government.
But even Human Rights Watch is wary.
There is little that could be done about the deterioration of our bilateral relationship with China – unless the aspiring Asian superpower abandons its outlandish territorial claims over the entire South China...