It is largely understood that in this era of civilization, whoever controls digital information and social media holds the power. The Internet with its seemingly endless ways of connecting people worldwide has quickly devolved into a battle royale for the right to control the conversation. Social media in particular has been a tool and a malignant source of the cultural ills our society is facing today. Perhaps none more so than TikTok.

Ever since the video sharing app hit the American market, it has skyrocketed in popularity. Anyone can become a celebrity, people can go viral overnight, and the dopamine hits are intoxicating. Unfortunately, this app is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, where over 300 current employees used to work for the Chinese state media.

TikTok, with its veneer of fun and possibility, is engineered to bring out the worst in American society, mess with our kids, and has provided tons of data (both biometric and otherwise) that China probably has access to. This is not the sort of information that our greatest geopolitical adversary should have.

What’s even worse is that The New York Times appears to have solicited TikTok to censor concerns about the upcoming 2022 midterms. In an article by Tiffany Hsu, she expresses concern that misinformation that has interfered with other countries’ elections has arrived in the United States. She admits that The New York Times has called on TikTok to block, delete, and censor videos and other content that has the hashtag #StopTheSteal or #StopTheSteallll. Many Americans are concerned that the last election was not on the up-and-up, which is reasonable because the election rules were drastically changed ostensibly to accommodate concerns about COVID-19. These changed election rules, which included vastly expanded bulk-mail balloting, made accomplishing voter fraud much easier.

This admission by Tiffany Hsu is indeed troubling, though perhaps not surprising. The New York Times, after all, had an editor propose getting Senator Chuck Schumer’s approval for an article written by Senator Tim Scott. In that article submitted by Senator Scott, he exposed why a policing reform bill he proposed fell apart. Scott claimed that Schumer and his Democrat allies were more focused on using the bill as a political tool against the Republicans than on actually coming up with practical strategies to alleviate the problems with poor policing practices.

This explicit partisanship is shameful for a newspaper that purports to be unbiased. Now this information regarding meddling in TikTok comes to light. If this doesn’t clearly confirm that the Times is the propaganda arm of the Left, we don’t know what does. Knowing the explicit ties of TikTok to the Chinese Communist Party gives this a whole new level of scary. It prompts an astute observer to wonder how in bed with the CCP is the Left, or how much of our information/misinformation is dictated by the CCP.

Either way, this is very troubling. TikTok in particular needs to be banned from the U.S. like former President Donald Trump tried to do and like many senators and representative are trying to accomplish still. Congressman Mike Gallagher put it absolutely perfectly when he said: “Enough is enough. It has been clear to anyone paying attention that TikTok is not only destroying our children’s brains, but also poses an unacceptable threat to our national security. It is long past time to ban its operation in the United States.”