Local students react to potential TikTok ban

By Riley Funk

College students from St. Joseph expressed mixed emotions after the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill to possibly ban the social media app TikTok.

The vote passed in Washington D.C. with 352 in favor and 65 against. Many lawmakers are concerned about the app being a tool for the Chinese Communist Party to spy on its users.

The bill that was passed on Wednesday morning gives TikTok a chance to avoid a ban in the United States if the platform finds a new owner than ByteDance.

Students have their own opinions on what transpired on Capitol Hill.

Samantha Dotson and Isabella Flaska are both sophomores in college and Central High School alumnae. Each uses the social media app quite frequently.

Dotson said the possible ban is something that will require an adjustment, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“My first reaction was, if it gets banned, how am I going to spend so much of my free time? And that was kind of a worrying reaction,” Dotson said. “I’m kind of like, ‘Maybe I should take a step back.’ It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a social media app.”

Dotson said the app has been beneficial to finding new businesses and singers.

Flaska agrees with Dotson that the app can be very time-consuming.

“It’s very addicting, personally. I feel like that time we used to spend watching those TikToks, we used to do other things like homework or going outside, doing all that stuff,” Flaska said.

Flaska said there are a number of different things that lawmakers could be focusing on other than banning the app.

“A big and passionate issue for me is our homeless situation here in the United States and also kind of has to do hand in hand with our drug issue too,” Flaska said. “I feel like we could provide more services to our homeless population … I feel like we ignore them a lot.”

Both said that if the platform is banned, they will miss it, but also that there’s more to it.

Dotson said with services in the app, like its ability to cater to the user, people can fall into their own ‘echo chambers’ while using TikTok.

“We hear very similar things from people that we have very similar perspectives with … I always think going out and meeting people in real life is 100% the best way to go, but sometimes that’s hard,” Dotson said. “TikTok came from the pandemic when we couldn’t talk with people, so maybe we’ve outgrown it … maybe we can grow with it.”

Flaska said although she does feel the app is addicting, she thinks banning it could be a bad thing later on because of the current access to information shared among users on the app.

“I feel like it’s a bad thing. I feel like they’re trying to purposely censor information from the general population,” Flaska said. “I feel like this is information that we as a society need to know more about and just taking that away from us doesn’t sit right with me personally.”