Moroccan elected officials are going out of their way to try to ban TikTok. It’s not very original because other personalities, in other Gobe countries, have tried the same thing. But not for the same reasons, as we will see a little later.
In absolute terms, banning is a vain idea. It’s useless and often has the opposite effect.
Ban something and it comes back in your face, like a boomerang effect. Because we like the forbidden fruit.
The Moroccan government, which has many other fish to fry at the moment, has said: we do not prohibit but we regulate. That means: we don’t really know what to do at the moment, but we will manage. Inshallah, of course.
We are talking here about one of the leading social networks in the world, in terms of consumption. TikTok has 1.5 billion consumers. Many even use it as a search engine. This means that these people, who are mostly young, will discover the world and learn about life through the TikTok filter. This prospect is not very happy. But that doesn’t mean that TikTokers will be future mentally retarded people.
In fact, TikTok’s detractors around the world accuse it of too many things at once. They no longer know where to start. In Europe and the United States, he is probably also criticized for being born in Asia. It’s soft power from elsewhere. A Chinese thing that we should be wary of.
What if all this was called the fear of the unknown, like the one that had already gripped us at the birth of the internet? It’s like when you discover a new window: it can bring you more light, but also more dust, wind, rain, insects and all kinds of intruders. You become more vulnerable. Should we close this new window? The question needs to be asked.
In Morocco, our elected officials criticize TikTok for depraving our kids. They want to protect young people. This wish has something naive which makes it pious. And hollow.
Let me tell you a story. A friend told me about his fight to protect his child from images of violence on the Internet. He forbade him to use the telephone, so the child sulked and sank into the beginnings of depression. So he bought her a new phone which he “regulated” by locking certain access points. He also locked all the computers at home, and even the “smart” television that sits in the family living room.
It was then that he discovered that the child had developed a new habit: virtual games, which occupied him 24 hours a day!
The moral of this story is that indiscriminate repression has never protected anyone. It is the recourse of those who have no recourse. Of course we have to do something and this something is called dialogue, listening.
To return to this TikTok which torments us, we can ask ourselves this little question: by closing this chinese business, will our children be less “depraved” and more intelligent?
