Beware of TikTok

It’s not at all what it seems...

Most people have heard the story of the Trojan Horse... Greek soldiers built a large wooden horse and hid men inside it. The Trojans were said to have accepted the horse as a victory offering and pulled it into their city. When night fell, the Greeks climbed out of the horse and opened the gates to the city so the rest of the Greek army could enter unopposed and destroy the city of Troy, thereby ending the war.

This tale of deception would be epic if it were true… unfortunately, it is about as believable as the last useless Marvel Comics movie.

Ancient Greeks believed the myth was an actual historical event that occurred in the 12th century BC. As it turns out, the event was one of the biggest legends in Greek mythology and was described in both Homer's The Iliad and the Odyssey (750 B.C) and the Aeneid of Virgil, a Latin epic poem written sometime between 9 and 19 BC. Neither writer was alive when the supposed deception occurred.

In our time, software that appears legitimate but is malicious is often referred to as a “Trojan Horse.”

One of those is TikTok...

C’mon, man... How can TikTok be any more dangerous than, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter?

TikTok’s parent, ByteDance Ltd., is a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. They have the ability to harvest and share the data they collect with the Chinese Communist Party.

Ever read TikTok’s privacy policy?  It includes the phrase "collects the information you provide in the context of composing, sending, or receiving messages.” So ... even if you type a message, but then delete it before sending it... TikTok sees and remembers.

But there’s more... With TikTok installed on your phone, they can access your:

• Phone number

• Email address

• Location

• Keystrokes

• Phone model and operating system

• Contact lists

TikTok users might as well put all that information on a billboard on a busy interstate highway.

But dear reader, that is not the worst of it...

Much like Twitter has historically been a liberal echo chamber, TikTok is full of LGBTQ+ propaganda. According to a recent survey conducted by Summit.org, 50.3 percent of TikTok users foolishly believe introducing children to transgenderism, drag shows, and LGBT themes is helpful for their emotional and psychological development. (The brain is not fully developed until around age 25.) Furthermore, 44.9 percent of TikTok users say introducing children to transgenderism, drag shows, and LGBT themes is “motivated by a desire to help children.”

What is striking about these TikTok users is that the data shows the largest group of TikTok users (38.4 percent) are young females between the ages of 18 and 24. This is similar to the same age group as AFABs (assigned female at birth). AFABs are people cited by Virginia Tech researchers as showing the sharpest increase in gender dysphoria.

I wonder where they are getting those ideas...

In December 2022, the United States banned TikTok on all federally-owned government devices. In late March 2023, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley tried to force a vote on legislation that would ban TikTok from operating in the United States within 30 days. The vote was blocked by those legislators who are supposed to be looking out for us. Yet, millions of Americans continue to let potentially bad players into sensitive areas of their lives by happily installing TikTok on their smartphones.

TikTok, as of this writing, allows Mexican cartels to post recruitment videos with the intent to employ American citizens to engage in human smuggling. Instead of removing these illegal advertisements, TikTok allows cartel recruiters to stay on the platform and organize to commit multiple felonies via human smuggling. Down in Kinney County, Texas, near the border, 99.9% of smugglers they encounter and arrest are American citizens likely recruited in this manner. (Source)

On June 21, TikTok admitted, after pressure from U.S. lawmakers, that it stored sensitive data from some American content creators in China.

An investigation by Forbes in late May found that TikTok had stored the Social Security numbers and tax information of thousands of creators and businesses on the platform.

Whether TikTok is banned from the U.S. or not, doesn’t matter... Get it off your kid’s phone and your other devices now!

P.S. If you have purchased a new laptop, tablet, or desktop recently, TikTok may have come pre-installed. Follow your operating system’s instructions for uninstalling it.