Nothing has challenged Silicon Valley like the Chinese app. Blocking its use in the US would be like stealing half the books in a library<\/p>\n
How many times in your life can you say that one of the culture-defining platforms of your era is being forcibly removed? This is what will happen to the one third<\/a> of American adults who use TikTok \u2013 and the other two-thirds whose lives have been undoubtedly affected by it \u2013 if the US supreme court upholds its ban on the Chinese-owned app<\/a>, as it is expected to do on 19 January, in the interests of national security.<\/p>\n I have spent the last few years researching instances of linguicide, <\/strong>where authoritarian regimes have burned dictionaries, or sent people to prison just for singing a song. I see alarming parallels with the dismantling of TikTok in the US; a ruthless cull of a communication tool that challenges Silicon Valley hegemony and gave the US a serving of what it is allegedly supposed to prize: healthy, full-fat competition.<\/p>\n Sophia Smith Galer is a journalist, content creator and the author of Losing It<\/a><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nothing has challenged Silicon Valley like the Chinese app. Blocking its use in the US would be like stealing half the books in a library How many times in your life can you say that one of the culture-defining platforms of your era is being forcibly removed? This is what will happen to the one … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}