that's impressive Paul, I'm happy for you! I think you know why, at least you have a good idea about it 😀

I don’t know why John Oliver or the Last Week Tonight team did such a shallow job researching this topic. Maybe it was just an easy filler episode? But I feel like I’ve lost trust in their ability to take a neutral, comprehensive look at issues and topics.

Before this happened, support for banning TikTok among Republicans and Democrats wasn’t strong enough. But after this event, it became clear to all of them that this is exactly the kind of outside influence they should be concerned with.

This action clogged local governments and actually proved that TikTok, as an external entity, can influence discussions and perceptions in the U.S.

Those teenagers didn’t just spontaneously decide to call their local governments; TikTok told them to do it. TikTok actively urged users to help fight the ban and even provided a blueprint on how to do it, like calling local authorities.

As for the second point, he didn’t even address it at all? The crazy part is that, at the very beginning, he showed how a lot of teenagers were upset about the looming ban and literally called local governments to stop it. He joked about it—it was funny—but he missed a critical detail.

Imagine the same argument in China: “ByteDance tracks a lot of data on Chinese citizens, so Meta and Google should be able to do it too.” That discussion would be unthinkable, right?

For the first point, he essentially said, “Yes, TikTok extracts too much data, but so do Meta and Google, so it’s fine?” But even if it isn’t fine that Meta and Google are doing that, they’re still American companies, which seems like a huge differentiator, or not?

John Oliver mentioned at the start that he wanted to cover two main points: first, how TikTok can scrape data about U.S. citizens in a problematic way, and second, how TikTok can push content to U.S. citizens in a problematic way.

Watch it yourself here youtu.be/YsXCVsDFiXA