Banning TikTok Would Make Americans Poorer

We begin today with two of my personal biases:

1. Politicians are, by and large, idiots.
2. I love TikTok.

In the center of the Venn Diagram for those two biases is the reason for today’s dispatch: Congress banning TikTok (which could take effect Jan. 19) and the implications doing so has.

By “implications,” I mean more than the economic side of the ledger, and certainly more than the entertainment side.

Broader implications arise regarding personal freedoms and the aforementioned idiocy of politicians as a group.

But let me back up and explain what’s what…

So, if you are not familiar with TikTok, it is a social media app for short-form video content—everything from cute baby sneezes and viral dance moves to political ranting and cats being cats.

And it is huge!

Globally, more than 1 billion users have a TikTok account—so basically one in every eight humans on the planet, though if we weed out all the toddlers and octogenarians and above, it’s probably closer to one in six or seven.  Of those, about 170 million Americans have a TikTok account, or basically one in every two Americans (though, again, we need to axe the super young and the super old… but you get the point: A vast swath of America is on TikTok).

To the clown show in DC, this can only be bad news.

See, the impression among the clowns is that TikTok is Chinese because the parent company, ByteDance, was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs. And in this political era in America, anything “made in China” must mean that the Chinese are using that item to spy on America.

Of course, pesky facts once again have a way of making the clowns look like illiterate buffoons (not that that’s especially hard). Truth is, nearly 60% of TikTok is owned by global investment groups like America’s Carlyle Group and Susquehanna International. Another 20% is by ByteDance employees all over the world, and the remaining 20% is owned by the founder, who has no ties to the Chinese government in any way.

Ironically, TikTok isn’t even available in China, and its HQ is split between Los Angeles and Singapore.

But no matter. A politician with a bone…

Thing is, TikTok pays content creators for the content they create and the traffic they drive to their videos. Numerous American TikTok influencers are earning tens of millions of dollars every year. Some are earning a quarter-mil per video, and those videos are often just seconds long, maybe a minute or two.

In all, American content creators are earning an estimated $8.5 billion per year in income.

For some, the money they earn is just side-hustle income to help afford life in overly expensive America. For others, the money they earn is their livelihood. They’re not just creating videos, they’re creating merch that they’re selling and they’re partnering with domestic and global brands who want access to that creator’s vast base of followers. (Bella Poarch, formerly a member of the US Navy, has more than 94 million followers that she monetizes in various ways.)

Consider how much money $8.5 billion is…

The average US salary in 2024 was roughly $62,000, meaning $8.5b represents nearly 140,000 average US jobs.

What happens when you, the government, take away that livelihood by banning a social media app that is not owned by the Chinese and does not spy on Americans?

You create economic hardship in a country where economic hardship is already an epidemic.

But like I said, this goes beyond money and entertainment.

It goes to the concept of personal freedoms, which the US was built on but which politicians over the last 20-plus years have been whittling away in favor of government control over everything.

The idea that America is the “Land of the Free” is increasingly a punchline.

Congress clearly seems to think Americans are stupid. One of the arguments among politicians (absent anything you might call proof) is that the Chinese government monkeys with the TikTok algorithm so that American users see content that is anti-American so that these suddenly brainwashed Yanks turn against the United States.

Spend any time on TikTok (and I spend way, way, way too much time on TikTok before bed) and you’re left wondering how a recipe for homemade sour cream or insights into building an Etsy shop (my newest hobby) would somehow rob the red, white, and blue from American veins.

Of course it wouldn’t!

My god, does Congress not understand the whole notion of “American Exceptionalism” that we were all raised on? Do politicians not see the “Murica #1” mentality that oozes from this country? Just spend a moment or two on TikTok, and what you see is a lot of Americans defending America.

Good goobily go—you really need to have been slapped with a stupid stick to think Americans are so gullible, and their love of country so ephemeral, that a social media app filled with cat videos, goofy dancing, recipes, and whatnot would have them thinking, “You know, communism really sounds like what I need in my life!”

For me, this is just another in a worryingly expansive list of freedoms that Congress continually usurps.

Controlling the media. Just another path to controlling lives.