New York Times tech reporter/columnist Kevin Roose is notorious here at NewsBusters for hailing a gay-Marxist activist who successfully “demonetized” a conservative comedian’s YouTube account, and for nudging social media platforms toward anti-conservative censorship.
While Roose surely surprised readers with his reluctant approval of a TikTok ban in his Friday piece, “TikTok Is Its Own Worst Enemy,” his reasoning was unintentionally amusing and revealing of hypocrisy.
I was really rooting for TikTok.
In 2020, when the Trump administration first tried to force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or risk having it shut down, I argued that banning TikTok in the United States would do more harm than good.
Why? Partly because TikTok seemed like a convenient scapegoat for problems — invasive data collection, opaque content policies, addictive recommendation algorithms — that plagued all the big social media apps, and partly because I never bought the argument that the app …