‘Don’t take away my TikTok!’ Gen Zers are against banning the China-owned platform

Gen Zers are worried that China will use TikTok to spy on them and spread propaganda, but they still don’t want the US government to ban their favorite social media app, polls show.

TO socialsphere surveywhich focuses on younger adults in the US, found that 53% of Gen Z adults were against the Biden administration following through on its threat to ban TikTok, while 34% supported doing so.

Even so, those same respondents, who range in age from 18 to 26, were highly concerned that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the security threats this poses.

Sixty percent of Gen Zers were concerned that the app was sucking up their data, and 58 percent were concerned that TikTok’s algorithms were censoring some content while also spreading “propaganda or misinformation” to US users.

The survey comes after US lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew for five hours on Thursday about data security and harmful content, and as the Biden administration considers banning the platform because of its Chinese connections.

A full ban on TikTok in the US would risk popular and political backlash from its young user base and civil liberties groups.

Although Gen Z respondents were against banning a platform that 71 percent of them used, they slightly disagreed with their older cohort of Millennials.

Millennials favored banning TikTok, by a margin of 49 percent to 34 percent. They were more concerned about the Chinese government leveraging their data and sending propaganda to their phones.

Both cohorts were concerned that Chinese spies could collect details of their ‘voices or pressure points’ via the platform today and then use them to blackmail targets who may grow up to work in government or lead an industry.

John Della Volpethe founder and CEO of SocialSphere, said the survey found that Gen Zers were reluctant to give up their favorite app, but might nonetheless be open to the persuasion that it was generally bad for them. national security.

“Gen Z certainly loves TikTok — it’s a source of entertainment, tips and income for influencers,” Della Volpe told NBC News.

‘To ban it without a clear presentation of the facts would be jarring; But what this survey shows is that two-thirds of young Americans are concerned about Chinese threats to national security, and Generation Z is more pragmatic than many initially thought.”

Support for the ban rose as respondents were told the US government was concerned about Beijing’s ties to TikTok, which is the most popular social media platform among Gen Z voters.

Gen Z voters said they are 66 percent favorable on TikTok compared to 31 percent unfavorable, while millennials, who range in age from 27 to 42, were more divided, at 46 percent favorable versus 42 percent unfavorable.

The survey of 1,607 registered voters conducted online on March 22, 2023 arrived this week as

TikTok boss Chew received a verbal slap from the House Energy and Commerce Committee panel when questioned by lawmakers about safety and harmful content.

During five hours of testimony, Chew repeatedly denied that the app shares data or has connections to the Chinese Communist Party and argued that the platform was doing everything it could to ensure the safety of its 150 million American users.

Chew said that TikTok for more than two years has been building a “firewall to seal US users’ protected data from unauthorized foreign access.” The bottom line is this: US data stored on US soil, by a US company, supervised by US personnel.

But not a single lawmaker offered their support for TikTok, finding Chew’s responses about China evasive and expressing concern about the app’s power over American children.

Some said that TikTok even promoted eating disorders among children, the sale of illegal drugs and sexual exploitation.

It’s unclear how lawmakers will proceed after the hearing or how quickly they could move to pass legislation to strengthen the Biden administration’s legal powers to ban TikTok.

Some 20 US senators, 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans, have backed bipartisan legislation giving President Joe Biden’s administration a path to ban TikTok, and the app’s fate has added a new element to tensions between Washington and Beijing. .

TikTok said last week that the Biden administration has required its Chinese owners to sell their stakes or face a possible ban.

Congress, the White House, the US military, and more than half of US states have already banned the use of the app from official devices. Similar bans have been imposed in Denmark, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand, as well as in the European Union.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said that forcing the sale of TikTok “will seriously damage the confidence of investors around the world, including China, to invest” in the United States, and that Beijing will oppose any sale.

TikTok is not available in China, where ByteDance offers a Chinese equivalent, Douyin. Still, the hearing was closely watched in the country, with related news posts garnering millions of views on the Weibo microblogging site.

In 2019, The Guardian reported that TikTok was instructing its moderators to censor videos that mentioned Tiananmen Square and included images unfavorable to the Chinese government.

The platform says it has since changed its moderation practices.

Concerns were raised when ByteDance admitted in December that it fired four employees who accessed data from two journalists and people linked to them last summer while trying to discover the source of a leaked report about the company.

Concerns about what content Americans find online, or how tech companies collect their data, are not new. Congress has tried to reduce the amount of data technology companies collect through a national privacy law, but those efforts have failed.

Wires contributed to this report.