20,000 signatures reached
To: Members of Congress, Biden Administration
Don’t Ban TikTok!
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There are plenty of issues that are front of mind for Americans across the country today: our bodily autonomy is under attack, from attacks on abortion care to attacks on IVF to attacks on gender-affirming care. LGBTQ+ youth is under attack. Systemic racism is harming Black, Indigenous, and brown people. There are millions of Americans who either have no healthcare or are underinsured. Americans owe over a trillion dollars in student debt. Dark money in politics is corrupting elected officials. Billionaires are avoiding paying their fair share in taxes. Rent prices are soaring and higher than ever while the federal minimum wage hasn’t gone up from $7.25 in 15 years. We are still in a pandemic. Communities still don’t have access to clean water. Climate change due to fossil fuels is destroying our communities.
But one of the latest laws that the House of Representatives passed? An unconstitutional bill to ban TikTok, violating and limiting the free speech of the over 150 million Americans who use the app. They need to focus on the issues that are actually negatively affecting our communities.
We must come together to stop this. Will you sign the petition to say NO to a TikTok ban NOW?
Why is this important?
TikTok is a place where millions of Americans have gone to find community, education, to grow their small businesses, and to organize on issues that affect our communities. It should not be banned. Members of Congress are claiming that banning TikTok is an issue of national security and data privacy, meanwhile little has been done to pass a comprehensive data law that protects us from all social media companies.
In 2018, it was revealed that a data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team harvested 50 million Facebook profiles of American voters. This was one of Facebook’s biggest data breaches ever, and the data was used to build a software program that influenced the 2016 election by targeting them with political advertisements. TikTok shouldn’t get singled out when privacy, data tracking, and data harvesting is an issue with ALL social media platforms.
After members of Congress in the House of Representatives voted to pass a law to ban TikTok, it was revealed that some of those who voted for the TikTok ban may own $29 million to $126 million worth of stock in TikTok’s competitors like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snapchat. This means that many of the same politicians who voted for a TikTok ban would financially benefit from a TikTok ban. It’s unacceptable.
A TikTok ban would also harm small businesses. Over 5 million small businesses have TikTok accounts and TikTok generated $14.7 BILLION in revenue just last year which created over 224,000 U.S. jobs.Banning TikTok could be financially devastating for millions of people across the country.
The truth is, data privacy is a huge issue. Companies track our data, our conversations, the things we view on social media platforms and use it to target us, and then sell our information to third parties all the time. But this isn’t just a TikTok issue. It’s a Big Tech issue. And just banning TikTok won’t fix it. Only passing strong national privacy legislation will truly protect us and our data. And together, we can demand it.
In the meantime, we must come together to ensure that members of Congress don’t avoid the real issues at hand and that they don’t violate our free speech by banning TikTok.
Will you take action now and sign the petition?