If Joe Biden isn’t a guy who wants to lose the youth vote, he’s doing a heck of an impression.
U.S. President Biden, who is seeking re-election this fall, signed a bill last week which demands that popular, Chinese-owned social media app TikTok be sold to a U.S. buyer, or else the app will be banned. The short-video app, highly popular among users from gen Z and younger, had 150 million users in the U.S. as of May last year, according to Tiktok.
It’s a strange move for a president who is already facing harsh critiques from younger voters. In addition to mass outcry among young left-leaning voters over Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, he now seems content to sign off on the destruction of something many of the country’s youngest voters have come to love.
SUSAN WALSH / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES U.S. President Joe Biden
Arguments in favour of the ban claim that so much American user data being in the hands of a Chinese firm gives the country too much access to sensitive or useful information. After all, like all social media apps, nothing is quite as anonymous as it seems, and there are reams of advertising data and other personal details to be mined from the site’s userbase, and concern about foreign interference from Beijing is at a high.
This paper made the point in a different, recent editorial that social media platforms like TikTok have many problems, among them the fact they are hotbeds for misinformation and scams from con artists and, to use a gen-Z phrase, “clout chasers” of all sorts. But the argument that there is something to fear in China having access to the sort of data TikTok would gather — to the extent it must be appropriated through a forced sale, or else — is a little rich. It’s not as though all the data being harvested on Facebook, X, Instagram, et cetera has been mined for some benevolent purpose by their corporate philosopher-kings.
Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, has said it will not sell. In that case, that means the app is gone from U.S. devices, unless the U.S. government backs down.
For Biden to sign a bill calling to ban TikTok, even though the ban came out of a usually-fractious Congress, is tantamount to loading a rifle and aiming it right at his own toes.
It may spell doom for Biden and the Democrats. A CNN poll released in late April puts Trump 11 points ahead of Biden among voters aged 18-34. Young voters were also overall less satisfied with their choices in the election. Sixty-eight per cent of younger Americans see his presidency as a failure. A caveat on the poll offered in CNN’s breakdown is that Biden’s shortcomings with the youth vote are made worse by the inclusion of data from those who did not vote four years ago. But, that’s the problem.
Younger voters, it would seem, are rejecting the notion that they must vote for one choice or the other. The common wisdom is “if you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain,” but the young are challenging that notion. If neither party presents them with a palatable choice, they seem to say, then why choose at all? Not voting, for them, tells the major parties that “the other guy is worse” is not in and of itself a message worth voting for.
The youth in America may well choose to stay home on election day than reward Biden and the Democrats for what they see as a refusal to take their demands seriously. Like it or not, it’s a choice they get to make, and if Biden doesn’t get wise to that, it will mean ceding the White House in the fall. Tick-tock, TikTok.
