A majority of American young people prefer a Communist Chinese government-tied social media app to a fundamental constitutional right. 
The Reboot Foundation published a May 2023 report that included sobering new statistics. If given the choice between having the right to vote for a year and having access to TikTok, 61 percent of the so-called “TikTok generation,” which is ages 13 to 24, would sacrifice their voting rights for a year to stay on social media, according to Reboot. An even higher 64 percent of teenagers ages 13 to 17 would rather sacrifice the right to vote for a year for TikTok. Chinese-owned TikTok, which is designed to be addictive, and to feed kids harmful content, has seemingly been all too successful at capturing young Americans.
“Do young people really think so little of the democratic process that they’d trade their vote for their TikTok username? Perhaps,” Reboot wrote.
A growing consensus is calling TikTok a national security risk, although the Biden White House has recruited TikTok stars to promote the President for the second “Biden in the Basement” presidential campaign.
“The average teen TikToker spends more than two hours daily on the app, with 23 percent on it for more than four hours. Of young girls and women, 29 percent use the app more than four hours daily,” Reboot reported. TikTok has supposedly instituted a new restriction on daily time allowed to teen users.
The American version of the TikTok app feeds young people harmful, pornographic content, and teens could scroll the app for hours a day until recently. But the Chinese sister app Douyin is wildly different. Young Chinese are automatically restricted to a certain amount of time on Douyin, and the app feeds users educational, inspirational content. TikTok is not available in China.
The app is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) owns a board seat and maintains a financial stake. The CCP also practices “civil-military fusion,” which allows everything in the economic and tech spheres to be accessible to the Chinese military. The CCP has further demanded that tech companies, including ByteDance, share data—including “non-public” data—with the government. Yet a majority of U.S. teens would reportedly prefer Chinese spyware TikTok to voting.
It’s an open question why a majority of American teens do not seem to understand how essential the right to vote is. And how did America reach the point where Chinese spyware was allowed to dominate the lives of most of America’s youth?
According to the Reboot report, “From raising the age at which a child can open a social media account to requiring warning labels on their usage, adults overwhelmingly support measures that would shift the playing field between social media platforms and their youngest users.” Reboot urged parents to monitor kids more actively too.
ByteDance employees can access the highly detailed data that TikTok collects to spy on Americans, and the CCP may have access to the same information. It is time to hold TikTok accountable, before even more young Americans become addicted to its harmful algorithm.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact TikTok via email at communitymanager@tiktok.com and demand Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment and provide transparency. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
