President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump may have conducted their presidencies quite differently, but they shared the same skepticism of TikTok.
TikTok, the widely used social media platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has received mounting criticism in recent years from American public officials for its connections with the Communist Party of China.
President Trump signed an executive order to force TikTok to separate from ByteDance. The move was ultimately blocked by a U.S. federal judge in 2020. But this year, President Biden signed a “TikTok Ban Bill,” which requires ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company or face expulsion from U.S. app stores.
Mike Solana, founder of Pirate Wires and chief marketing officer at Founders Fund, joined James Poulos to share why he thinks TikTok poses a serious national security threat:
Despite spending no more than 10 minutes on TikTok a day, Solana said he grew concerned with a potent, recurring feature on the app. No matter what, it served him an ad displaying an image of an impoverished Gaza. "It comes back relentlessly, the exact same ad, every single day. You're forced to look at it.” Who determines which images are selected to bombard American viewers? “I think that's something that our government should care about," Solana said.
Social media changes the way people think, he continued. “It shapes your sense of what is the perspective you're supposed to have,” much as advertising forces you to “look around subconsciously for cues on what to believe. ... The more people who are doing something, the more you feel that's what you should do and/or how you should feel even if you are fiercely independent.”
To hear more of what Mike Solana had to say about AI, social media, Bitcoin, and more, watch the full episode of "Zero Hour" with James Poulos.
America was convinced tech would complete our mastery of the world. Instead, we got catastrophe — constant crises from politics and the economy down to the spiritual fiber of our being. Time’s up for the era we grew up in. How do we pick ourselves up and begin again? To find out, visionary author and media theorist James Poulos cracks open the minds — and hearts — of today’s top figures in politics, tech, ideas, and culture on "Zero Hour" on BlazeTV.
