Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and World Editor Frances Martel both described TikTok, a video-sharing app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, as a “foreign weapon” targeting American children and youth on Monday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast.
TikTok’s displacement of Google as the world’s most popular website, Marlow held, is illustrative of a broader displacement of America’s global position by China. He warned of TikTok and other digital apps’ capacities to obstruct personal development with time-wasting endeavors.
He remarked, “I was floored by the data that TikTok is now even more popular than Google around the world as the most popular domain. Not only is TikTok run by the Beijing Communist Party, but it’s also something that is wildly distracting, and it seems to be custom-built to distract young Americans from doing anything productive, and just to get sucked into this black hole of staring at your screen all day doing stupid stuff.”
TikTok’s overtaking Google as the world’s most popular domain relates to American decline, Marlow determined. “It struck me as maybe the beginning of the end of American domination around the world, and I hate to be grave about it, but I think someone needs to be. If we keep doing this – wasting millions upon millions of hours – every year staring at these screens – are we going to be able to process exactly how scary the world can be?”
Martel replied, “TikTok is terrifying, because it’s a weapon targeted at the youngest Americans, and a lot of Americans are too busy trying to juggle two or three jobs to really stare at every single thing that their kid is watching on their computer, and that’s not their fault. That’s the fault of the non-Big Tech globalists that are making it impossible for you to sustain yourself on one salary, so you have to hustle with Uber or whatever and you’re not paying attention to your kids, and that’s where TikTok comes in.”
Children with busy parents are uniquely vulnerable to being cognitively damaged by TikTok, Martel warned.
She said TikTok “has essentially supplanted significant parts of parenting, so that’s really scary, because it hurts concentration. There’s a lot of creative energy in America that’s being poured into this, like people dancing with little captions that mean nothing.
She concluded, “TikTok — and social media, generally — are something that we need greater collective effort to combat, because it’s clearly a foreign weapon.”
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