Gen Z will REVOLT if Tik Tok gets banned in America

hello and welcome to the leon lush youtube channel allow me to address the elephant in the room right off the bat gotta get this out of the way if you're joining me after seeing last week's video that i did in this newer set i'm experimenting with you know that i try to bring my a game week after week but sometimes life gets the better of me and that happened last week i allowed this distracting shock white headphone cord to dangle across the front of my body just flapping in the breeze the entire video distracting you beautiful viewers from the things that actually matter on this channel which is the gorgeous hilarious and humble human being sitting right behind it and boy did you guys clap my cheeks about it in the comments so i sat down with my team we brainstormed we fought about it and we came up with a solution [Music] all right now that we've solved the great headphone cord disaster of 2020 let's talk about tick tock a little bit i know it might seem like tick tock is the only thing people talk about on the internet anymore but it can't be understated how culturally relevant and ubiquitous it has become not only the united states but worldwide in just a few short years so tick tock's been in the political news cycle for a while now because it's owned by a chinese company called bite dance and they collect a bunch of user data from everyone that uses it and bite dance has direct ties to the chinese communist party additionally recently there was a scare because donnie trumpkins started tweeting about how he was talking about banning it in the united states shortly after it was banned in india a few weeks ago which is has a massive user base and now you're talking about the us so uh naturally there was a massive freak out amongst avid tick talkers especially people that have exclusively built their brand or their audience on tick tock which is understandable i am literally the star of tick-tock and t-tuck [Music] now i'm no psychologist and just making my bed consistently in the morning is probably the biggest accomplishment i've had in the last 15 to 20 years but i do enjoy conjecturing about what's going on at a macro level when social media apps like tick tock infiltrate our lives it's such a massive scale and we're gonna do that after a few words from different outfit leon who's waiting patiently in the office behind me to talk about today's video sponsor raycon when it comes to comfortable and sleek true wireless earbuds raycon continues to impress at half the price of other premium brands their everyday e25s sound good they look good they charge on the go and they fit my ears comfortably now i've used a variety of earbuds in my day but at this price point raycon continues to smash it the bass response you get from the everyday e25s is impressive for an earbud this subtle so you don't have to sacrifice your low end thump for the convenience you get them both you also get six hours of play time easy bluetooth pairing and a noise 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sometimes he words tweets in a way that uh leave it open to interpretation and he's not always getting the point across exactly the way he wants to now the irony in this is as everybody knows at this point every app developer every big silicon valley company is collecting our data all the time i think most of these big app developers they give you that choice you know that checkbox you can hit where you can opt in to to share your data but you're never really looking into the fine print or what's going on and it lulls us into this sense of security like well i'm not gonna share my data usage so they can't give me a break dude if you're participating in social media in the online culture and you have one of these in your pocket 24 hours a day seven days a week you're about as anonymous as the sun in the middle of a desert it's just the reality of life in the digital age unless you're proactively keeping yourself off the grid and i mean that takes work you're just having data collected about you all the time and the commodification of this data is only becoming more and more prevalent everything we do from the searches in our google toolbar to our location being pinged wherever we go the gps on our phone all this is being packaged up nicely and being bought and sold by these huge companies so they can better either market to us or build a better program every day you and i just through our normal actions are giving these companies billions of data points that they can then build databases with and use to predict the actions we're going to take before we actually take them this isn't new news by any means and it's honestly quite fascinating if you think about the scale at which they're doing this and there are some people that are very apprehensive about it and don't like the idea of their actions being logged but most people myself included i would say everyday people they know about it kind of on the surface level but we don't care enough to sacrifice the luxuries of the smartphone and these social media apps that we're all addicted to so in the case of this ninja tweet a lot of people took it like oh ninja thinks it's okay for u.s companies to data farm but it's not okay for china to do for reference let's try and understand just what kind of data tick tock is collecting this is senator hawley as he tries to push legislation to get tick tock banned from all government devices more teenagers are on tick tock now than use facebook it counts millions and millions and millions of americans as users but it is owned by a chinese company that includes chinese communist party members in leadership and it is required under chinese law to share user data with beijing tiktok has admitted that it has sent user data to china to put it bluntly this is a major security risks risk for the american people and what kind of data is tick-tock collecting as it runs on our phones a heck of a lot more than you would think so that's the main threat being posed here is that bite dance the owner of tick tock is in bed with the chinese communist party and apparently according to senator hawley they're required to send data back to beijing now i'm not smart enough to know what this means on an individual level like what china's going to do with my data but i can see in like a government level why this might raise some security risks and why he's you know lobbying to get the app banned from people that have access to uh you know classified information people that work for the government images of course that users post but tick tock also collects information about the messages that you send about the apps that you use the other apps on your phone it collects the sites that you visit it collects your search history it collects your keystrokes it collects your location data it stores all of this and maybe lots lots more now one thing that raised my eyebrow there was the collection of your keystroke patterns which essentially means tick-tock could be storing your password information from apps other than tick-tock you can see what you're typing on your phone i also read something where it collects your clipboard data so for anyone who uses password managers like i do i know a lot of people do where you're constantly going into like one pass or last pass and you're copying your password over they can collect all of those as well the pentagon the department of state the department of homeland security and the tsa have all banned their employees and service members from using tick tock on government devices now for the majority of tick tock users you know i'm saying you're 14 year old taking selfies and uploading choreographed dances to the renegade i don't know what china's going to do with that information that you know the united states and these other big companies aren't already doing with our information but i do see at a government level where it makes sense and that's what senator hawley's pushing for here just restricting access to tick-tock on government devices traditionally if you work in a government job your computer your phones they're already pretty heavily monitored anyways if you have any sort of access to classified information it only makes sense to not be able to download an app owned by you know a competing country that you don't always get along with so here's abc a few days ago after donnie trumpkins made a few comments about the possibility about legislation to ban tick-tock in the united states today the chinese-based social media app tick-tock is back in the headlines president trump confirms that the united states is now considering banning the app in an interview with gray television tiktok has more than a billion users worldwide and 175 million downloads in the over a billion active users is a staggering number for the short time that tick tock has been around now i do understand it used to be musically a lot of you know that which was an american company before it got bought by bite dance i don't know two to three years ago and since then has really exploded the app has been controversial for its origins in china and for its alleged intrusive data collection policies but that hasn't slowed down its rising popularity both here and abroad so for most people tick-tock is just an app where we're teens and a handful of older folks record videos of themselves dancing oh come on lizzy give it a little more credit than that i know it was popularized by mostly talentless teenagers that became mega famous by lip syncing to popular songs after musically was bought by bite dance but since then it's really cultivated a very lively community of people from all walks of life creating funny creative 15 to 60 second pieces of art if you'll allow me unfortunately you know it's just the kind of kids that live in the hype house uh that are the face of the app to most of the general public explain how it goes from that to a potential national security threat is there a real danger here yeah one one cyber security expert described tick tock as a data collection app masquerading as a social media app and went so far as to call it outright evil wow so tick tock collects everything on your phone everything about the house oh my god wow you could literally say that about every social media app that we use and went so far as to call it outright evil listen i can handle the data farming i'm used to that all right but for a cyber security expert to go as far as to call it outright evil not in this christian household there's a line and they just crossed it time to delete tick tock tick tock collects everything on your phone everything about the hardware who you talk to when you talk to them where you go on websites uh everything that's on that phone to include where you are every 30 seconds is encrypted and sent somewhere back to that company's head company's headquarters and because we know that by law chinese companies which tick tock is have to cooperate with chinese intelligence services there's real concern around the world not just in the u.s that tick tock can be a tool of the chinese government now i don't know the specifics he's making it sound like tick tock collects a lot more data than like a normal social media app would the obvious issue here at least for most of the people debating this is the fact that it's communist china that is allegedly getting the data from all of the american users sent back to them that they can then use to do something grave and nefarious so steve let me put you on the spot here and just ask is this something that you do not have on your phone or that you would warn a family member from come on lizzy look at steve of course he has it the second that pink tie comes off the yeezys go on and he's doing duets with charlie demilio he has 3.6 million followers as we speak check them out i i some of my children do have it and i'm gonna have a little talk with them about what kind of data they're giving up hey honey would you mind coming over here for just a sec yeah no it'll only be a second i promise yeah hi sweet i love you too i know hey listen i know you're only 12 sweetheart but i think it's really important we have the talk uh about what kind of data you're giving the communist chinese party every time you upload one of your viral tick tock dances what am i talking about i was afraid you might say that you know it's it's a little complicated so here take a seat let's get into this for a while kids do not give a [ __ ] bro okay all they care about is you know positive affirmation from strangers on the internet in going viral in clout you could probably tell them that every time they uploaded to tick tock a small puppy on the other side of the world was killed uh and they they still would kids are kids you know they grew up with social media they know that privacy doesn't exist anymore it's the boomers that are super apprehensive you know i'm saying they they read a news article online about tick tock being owned by a chinese company and they think oh oh oh oh oh my privacy oh my security you want my daddy you gonna have to pry it for my cold dead hands china not today tick-tock delete it they post to facebook from the phone in their pocket that tracks every single move that they make all day long we know that lots of apps actually you you have to give up data if an app is free one way you're going to pay for it you're either going to accurate money down towards it or you're going to give them your personal data but in this case because we know that a hostile intelligence agency hostile the united states hustle till australia and india even just kicked the the app out of india 600 million users in us in india no longer have that app and tick tock will lose 6 billion in revenue so it's a global phenomenon but it means that you have to give up lots of information and you're giving it up to the chinese intelligence services you know i make jokes about it but i don't think it should be taken lightly obviously you know we live in a time where information warfare exists like data at scale can be weaponized for a certain agenda or a certain regime we've seen it with russia and i'm sure it's happening all the time all over the place i mean traditionally you think of war as like boots on the ground right but in today's digital age man with social media like cyber warfare information warfare is happening every single day all the time all around us you know i do my best to try and stay informed to think critically to make sure i'm not taking everything at face value and getting information from multiple sources all over the place because it is so so difficult to know who to trust to know what to trust today and frankly it's kind of it's i don't want to call it scary it's just unsettling just how things have progressed over the last 10 to 20 years in this complete distrust in the media not knowing what a reliable source of information is i mean it's no secret why someone like rogan has such a insanely large audience because he's looked at as kind of this you know unbiased everyday guy uh you know and i know he gets [ __ ] sometimes but that's what i think a lot of people are yearning for because it's so difficult to know if you're getting your news and your information from a source that is unbiased or that is accurate without some sort of agenda to push so with so many users here in the us is the damage already done when it comes to data collection and and do you see any free speech concerns with banning a social media app like this yeah some people are going to say look i'll do whatever i want it's my personal data and they are you know to each their own and if they want to give up their personal data certainly they can but i think that there's going to be pressure because there is bipartisan support on the hill to rain this app in and limit the amount of information that at least goes back to china and make sure that there is some sort of privacy on people's personal use it's scary people are worried about it because of its power and it's been downloaded so many times and is so popular so is tick tock just chinese spyware being used to accumulate data that's someday going to be used against us i have no way to make that determination i do think it's okay to be you know apprehensive about what data we're giving up as far as you and i are concerned who knows we'll have to make that decision for herself but like what's chyna gonna do with howie mandel's information actually on second thought if china was able to hack into the cell network in the united states and just distribute a howie mandel tick tock video to every person with a cell phone at the same time america surely would go up in flames but now for the important question what about gen z though what are they gonna do they don't give a [ __ ] about data they don't give a [ __ ] about china they only care about uploading viral tick tocks doing the renegade if you take that away from them if you all of a sudden block access to tick-tock on every phone in the united states there is going to be a massive uprising of pre-pubescent teenagers that i think will be the one thing that overthrows the government they've been crying about this for like an hour because it's just so like pathetic that like she just comes in like almost like she's so close to passing me and everybody's reminding me that she's gonna pass me and i just wanna bring this [ __ ] that i am better than her because i am so a [ __ ] lover and i am literally the star of titties oh the start is putting me down and boosting her up and they're about to go to take dye headquarters and strangle their necks wow now admittedly this is not a clip of her reacting to news of tick tock possibly being shut down this is from a few months ago and this is a clip of this tick-tocker zoe laverne uh the most popular at the time reacting to the the idea of charlie dimiglio passing her in followers now if you wanted to sum up something that embodied entitlement in 15 seconds all you'd have to do is show a clip of this video and i don't want to throw shade you know she's a young girl dealing with her own demons i'm sure but this just gives you an idea of how important these vanity metrics are to these young kids on these social media apps specifically tick tock in this case like i don't want to be known as like oh like zoey lover is nothing now like i don't want them to call me irrelevant like i don't want to be told that i'm irrelevant now this may be an extreme example but you can see the fear and the devastation in her eyes at the sheer notion of the possibility of her becoming irrelevant right in this case it's literally just her losing the number one spot she still has millions of followers probably making a ton of money but it gives you a little insight into the psychology that's going on with some of these young kids that have built the platform on tick tock i mean this girl is by no means a unique case you know if you were to take away tick tock next week the amount of kids and teenagers that have built a platform and tied their self-worth and their sense of identity to their social following their online profile for a lot of these kids which is tick-tock predominantly it would cause a lot of devastation and i know you watch a video of this girl and you think about it for the lay person it's really hard to feel bad for that person you look at her you see entitlement you see privilege all these things i understand that i think i have a little bit of a unique perspective because you know i grew up in a time where you know when i was going through the the pivotal developmental stages of my life middle school high school the awkward [ __ ] you know we didn't have this back then so it was you know that's it's what it was and now as an adult you know in my early 20s when youtube came out i was i started to upload the covers and kind of got my feet wet in it but didn't really have any audience to speak of until i was in my 30s you know and i'm 35 now and i'm able to do it full-time uh god willing and i certainly see it as a blessing but i think about you know the implications on a large scale of of what social media is doing to our younger generations and you know you can only see it at face value right now because there's not been enough data it has not been around long enough to really understand the long-term effects of it but i truly believe that the way apps like tick tock have really gripped you know the social norms of these young generations in the way that a lot of these kids so heavily rely now on these applications and these vanity metrics and the likes and the views uh for their own sense of identity their own self-worth has some pretty uh it will have some some consequences that we're just kind of scratching the surface on i'm no stranger to the emotional ebbs and flows of living a portion of my life online i feel very fortunate that i'm able to do this as a job right now that provides for my family i i have a lot of fun making videos and experimenting with new things uh but i'm i'm not delusional in the sense that this thing couldn't just disappear overnight right that's probably one of the biggest drawbacks is the uncertainty of your future although you look around the world after the last couple months and even the jobs you thought were the most secure in the world coveted 19 hits and you're out of a job so really in any walk of life and anything you decide to do there is never any sense of certainty tomorrow is always unknown so the only thing you can do is you know do your best in the moment and i think that one of my biggest one of the biggest blessings i have is in my job now is that it happened to me later in life you know what i'm saying i didn't have an audience to speak of until i was into my 30s if i was 16 17 you know just kind of randomly blew up on this app where i was dancing and lip syncing to some [ __ ] and all of a sudden millions of people are watching my every move and idolizing me like that that's gonna [ __ ] with your head i mean before social media it was child actors that you know they'd be super famous when they were kids and so often they would grow up to just crash and burn and completely [ __ ] the bed as humans because their perception probably of reality was so skewed by being introduced to this you know insane lifestyle so young and social media has kind of created that its scale i think where so many kids are just cultivating this are cultivating this warped perception of reality and simultaneously finding all of their their joy and happiness in these you know trivial interactions and these topical kind of affirmations coming from the internet listen i apologize for the tangent i'm certainly not an expert at this stuff i only know what i know through my own experience uh dabbling in the online world and you know being fortunate enough to do this full-time for a couple years now but i'm not delusional i know it might not last forever the only thing i know is that i trust in myself and my ability to work hard to adapt and to overcome adversity whatever that may be whether it means a pivot or whether it means i will be doing something else completely in five to ten years that unknown can be scary in this type of work but i have confidence in myself and my abilities and to kind of circle back to the whole tick tock thing and how it's infiltrated these younger generations all i can say you know the whole point of this is just to is to to be self-aware of what's happening i think in our society all around us more and more all of us myself included we're pinning our joy and our happiness and our sense of self-worth to vanity metrics whether it's views or likes um into the opinions of other people on the internet a lot of people we don't know some people we do and i think uh it's just so important sometimes to to step back from all that and really reevaluate like who you are what you want to be where are you getting your sense of purpose you sent to joy i feel like for me personally i find a lot of my purpose in you know being a good husband and being a good father uh you know my personal journey with fitness and trying to not be a fat bastard because i've been you know struggling with being obese my entire life and i've had some success there and then having hobbies and stuff i love to do that other people don't have to know about things that bring me joy and then you know the online thing is exhilarating obviously it feels good to get views and good comments but i know that if all that [ __ ] got taken away tomorrow if all that [ __ ] went away it would be devastating yes but i know that i would be okay because i've already because i have a foundation i've built a base to work on and i could i attribute a lot of that to the fact that you know i was born in 85 and i had a lot of time to kind of build that foundation before you know having the luxury of having an audience and i just don't know what it would be like if i was 15 and all of a sudden blew up and had millions of people watching my every move so my heart goes out sometimes to these younger kids going through this i know it's hard to empathize as you know a viewer with these people with big audiences they're making all this money but i think sometimes it's important to remember that behind all that clout and that money is still a human being and should be treated with an ounce of humanity even though it's so easy to dehumanize people uh behind a computer screen well things really went off the rails there one second we're talking about tick-tock being chinese spyware or not next thing you know i'm on this [ __ ] 15-minute soliloquy about social media and how it affects the younger generations and all shut up son of a [ __ ] no i'm just messing around i hope you guys don't mind me getting introspective once in a while i try to keep it typically light-hearted and uh and funny and filled with memes but but here we are i always appreciate your time and thank you for watching if you have any comments about tick-tock or the state of social media and how it's affecting you your parents your grandparents or your kids or your teenage daughter and son i'd love to hear it in the comments um stay blessed don't forget to hip-thrust that [ __ ] like button and if you're new and you subscribe that would mean the world we'll see y'all in the next video peace

Channel: Leon Lush

Views: 848,520

Rating: 4.9085541 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: hyHPkpeRuG8

Length: 25min 38sec (1538 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MrRuidiaz]

Another banger

[u/1BigUniverse]

fucking a cotton, bring back Vine. If there was ever a time for Vine to make it's come back, it's now.

[u/KrystolJ]

Your videos get me through my dreary days. I love watching Lush Life as well. You and your wife are awesome!!