Juno News - December 19, 2022


Should we ban TikTok in Canada？

Topics
should we ban tiktok from canada
Mentioned
Donald Trump Justin Chido Joe Biden
Everybody laughs at Jagmeet Singh Is the Freedom Convoy making a comeback？

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

180.97

Word count

561

Sentence count

28


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Should TikTok be banned in Canada? That s a question more and more people are asking themselves, and apparently security agencies in Canada are even looking into the issue. Based on concerns that the company that's based out of China is just way too cozy with the Chinese government, TikTok can t be trusted. And TikTok s already getting up to some sketchy things.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Should the Canadian government consider banning the social media platform TikTok?
00:00:04.940 That's a question more and more people are asking themselves,
00:00:07.760 and apparently security agencies in Canada are even looking into the issue.
00:00:12.480 Here's what's going on.
00:00:13.880 The U.S. is actually proposing, courtesy of some lawmakers,
00:00:18.060 to flat-out ban TikTok in their country.
00:00:20.900 Based on concerns that the company that's based out of China
00:00:23.900 is just way too cozy with the Chinese government,
00:00:26.800 TikTok can't be trusted, and TikTok's already getting up to some sketchy things.
00:00:33.000 Republican lawmakers have proposed the legislation,
00:00:35.660 but it's a bipartisan bill they've got backing from others,
00:00:39.000 and this bill may actually be proceeding.
00:00:41.480 The U.S. government in general has some concerns about TikTok.
00:00:45.000 This is not something that is a particularly partisan approach,
00:00:48.820 particularly after we see U.S. President Joe Biden's administration
00:00:52.220 picking up the ball where Donald Trump left off in terms of decoupling from China.
00:00:56.300 And one of the concerns is the degree to which various Chinese companies and tech entities
00:01:01.260 have their tentacles into the American way of life.
00:01:04.920 And that discussion is migrating up here to Canada.
00:01:07.900 A newly released study actually says that TikTok is proving harmful to young people,
00:01:12.900 particularly teenage girls, because of how the algorithms work
00:01:16.560 and the sort of content that they're pushing in the way that it's harmful.
00:01:20.000 One study found that within 30 minutes of an account being set up for a teenage girl,
00:01:24.620 they are flooded with content about weight loss and eating disorders,
00:01:29.140 the sort of stuff that can cause young women to adopt eating disorders,
00:01:33.820 leading a whole bunch of people to ask, what on earth is going on here?
00:01:37.080 Why is TikTok behaving this way?
00:01:39.000 Why are the algorithms working this way?
00:01:41.620 This is just a little too problematic for us,
00:01:44.080 based on concerns that they may be acting at the behest of the Chinese government.
00:01:48.360 We've had a lot of conversations recently in Canada the past couple of years
00:01:51.640 about both Chinese state-owned enterprises getting too involved in Canadian society
00:01:56.660 and in American society,
00:01:58.600 and also companies that may not be Chinese state-owned enterprises.
00:02:01.840 They may be privately owned companies in China,
00:02:04.440 but the way the laws work there, the way things generally operate,
00:02:08.060 these companies, the private ones, are still expected to divulge a lot of information
00:02:12.640 to the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian government based out of Beijing
00:02:16.640 and to basically do their bidding.
00:02:19.580 U.S. government documents have actually previously accused
00:02:22.000 the former head of TikTok of just being a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.
00:02:27.020 So this is where we're at right now,
00:02:28.880 in terms of the U.S. already pursuing a ban,
00:02:31.680 and here in Canada,
00:02:32.820 Prime Minister Justin Chido has basically acknowledged
00:02:35.200 that they're looking into it as well,
00:02:37.340 they're attentive to the issue,
00:02:38.600 and says our security agencies
00:02:40.080 are certainly taking a look at what's going on with TikTok.
00:02:44.080 Back in the day, we talked about just having a Facebook account,
00:02:47.720 a Twitter account,
00:02:48.480 things were much simpler then.
00:02:49.780 Now, there's a whole variety of new social media entities,
00:02:53.000 and people are concerned about the way some of them are affecting our daily lives,
00:02:56.720 and in the case of ones that are based in China,
00:02:59.340 concerned about privacy threats,
00:03:01.000 concerned about national security risks.
00:03:03.460 What do you think?
00:03:04.200 Should we ban TikTok from Canada?