“Hey, Lorie,” I said to my niece, “you call senator what’s-his-name and beg him not to ban TikTok yet?” I was over at my brother’s place. She was on the couch. And, of course, she was scrolling through her phone.
“No,” she says, looking over at me like it’s the dumbest thing she’s ever heard.
“Well, you better hurry. Before you know it, it’s gonna be a TikTok trend. You could get more TikTok followers that way.”
“That sh— is like currency these days,” my brother said from his easy chair. “Like a narcotic, these kids.”
“Well, which is it?” my niece said. “Drugs or money?”
“Both,” he said. “You make the exchange, then smoke the mule. Jack his wad.”
“Smoke the mule?” she said. “Jack his wad?”
“People are pissing their pants, threatening self-harm if Congress bans it,” I said. “Like, over the phone. Some are calling up during recess or whatever and pretending to scream cry, half of them hanging up when they realize they got a human adult on the other end.”
“Why are they banning it, anyway?” my niece said. “Why not ban all social media? Why just TikTok?”
“National security,” I said.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“Neither does social media,” my brother said.
“Didn’t what’s-his-name sell a bunch of Facebook user data to some British people before?” she said.
“What do you mean ‘before’?” I said. “He’s still doing it. It’s always going on. They all do it, all these companies. Hell, sometimes they just pass user info around to each other, like a fatty. Twitter sells user a massive amount of user information to Dataminr. While Elon Musk lies and says he’s fighting for user privacy. I mean, except for TikTok. Facebook paid some PR firm to smear TikTok a couple years ago, because it was taking away users.”
“Still, though. I don’t get it,” my niece said.
“National security!” my brother and I said at the same time. “God!” I said.
“I don’t know what that means!” she shouted back.
“They think China’s going to…I don’t know…launch a spy weather balloon over everyone’s house they get TikTok info on. Or try and recruit them to the Communist Party, maybe.”
“Can they do that?”
“Every company that operates in China, they gotta found a little group of Communist Party members within the company. They’ve also—ByteDance, I mean—given away what are called ‘golden shares’ of one of its subsidiaries straight to the Chinese government. So, maybe?”
“’Golden showers’?” my brother said. “So that’s how they roll? Lorie,” he turned from the TV, “I don’t want you getting into any of that weird, freaky sh—. Not until you’re eighteen.”
“So, six months from now?” she said.
“Yeah. No golden showers for six months.”
“You remember this all happened before, like, a year ago?” I said. “These TikTok jackasses all went to Congress, dressed like they do on TikTok, and made grandstanding jackasses out of themselves. Just to get more followers. And mainly because they were, like, seventeen. No offense,” I said to my niece.
“They don’t represent me!” she said back.
“Back in March of 2023, they flooded Congress to try and get everyone to swallow the TikTok pill. But Congress has already taken the hydroxychloroquine first, or whatever. TikTok even paid for some of these idiots to go. Plane tickets, hotels, lunches. The year before that, they spent over five mil for the cause—lobbyists flooding the halls. It’s really no different than that meat wave they got going on in Ukraine. With the Russians?”
“They’re voting with their feet,” my brother said.
“Most of them aren’t old enough to vote,” my niece said back.
“It’s like saying ‘Russian soldiers are defending Russia from the Ukraine Nazis’,” I said.
“Well, aren’t they?” my brother said. “That’s what Russia keeps telling me, anyway.”
“It’s like, ‘Hey, we got a problem. Let’s get a bunch of people who don’t know what really goes on, or why we even have a problem in the first place, convince them this is their fight, too, and get them to flood the battlefield with their future corpses. Without any training or moral support.’”
“Sounds like the national forces, there,” he said.
“Sounds like any big tech company,” my niece said. “Trying to buy influence in politics.”
“Yeah, but, the kids thing is what makes it different. Telling little kids to do your bidding. There’s just something slightly more wrong about it. It’s like you’re waiting outside the high school every day, trying to recruit fifteen-year-olds to take a selfie with you so you can look more family-oriented on your online dating profile.”
“That seems oddly specific,” my niece said.
“Hey, if it was good enough for the Jesus, with the Children’s Crusade, it’s good enough for the TikTok,” my brother said. “Am I right?”
“Can’t argue with that logic.”
