Local teen: “what the f*** is a newspaper?

BELLEVUE, Wash. – When confronted with the probability of a TikTok ban thanks to the $95 billion spending package passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, American teenagers and young adults are being told they will most likely need to get their news from other sources such as websites and newspapers.

While the newspaper industry has seen a steady decline recently thanks to a loss in readership, which has led to a smaller ad revenue, the industry is far from dead. However, some experts believe physical news may be on borrowed time as an increasing number of young adults rely more on short form video apps, such as Tiktok and YouTube to get their news.

“I have two jobs and drive for Uber in my free time and can barely make ends meet,” said Derek McHumphry, an elder millennial who remembers his father reading the newspaper every morning when he was a kid. “I don’t have time to sit down and read a newspaper and I’ve only got enough time to maybe read one or two articles while I’m taking my morning dump. The only other way I can consume news that’s of any importance to me is while watching TikTok on my phone while going to work, hoping my distracted driving will send me off a bridge or into a tree and rid me of the crushing burdens of this mortal coil.”

Although the senate has said the bill that recently passed the House isn’t a ban on TikTok, but rather a forced divestiture—the partial or full disposal of a company through sale, exchange, closure, or bankruptcy—to a U.S. owned business, critics of the legislature have said the result will be the same: the end of TikTok in America.

What this bill will do, if it becomes law, is require ByteDance, the Chinese-owned parent company of TikTok, to sell its shares to a non-Chinese owned company or the app will be blocked from receiving updates and be dropped from the App Store and Google Play store, essentially breaking the app and making it unusable to anyone in the United States.

The problem with this is that ByteDance has absolutely no reason to sell its shares as the United States only makes up about 2% of its total users, so why would it sell its cut of a $16 billion company to appease a minor fraction of the userbase? To make matters more complicated, ByteDance isn’t a purely Chinese-owned company. Sixty percent of the company is owned by international investors, 20% by its Chinese co-founders, and 20% by its employees—which include 7,000 Americans. Also, ByteDance’s five-member board of directors includes three Americans.

“Look, we understand the ownership situation at ByteDance is complicated, but the fact of the matter is this doesn’t really have anything to do with who owns TikTok,” said an aide to a U.S. representative who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity. “In reality, we don’t like the idea that young voters, and soon-to-be young voters, are being influenced by media that doesn’t neatly align with the carefully woven narrative the Republicans and Democrats have formulated in conjunction with the deep state.”

The talk of a TikTok ban has made many newspaper conglomerates excited about the opportunity to reinstate the physical newspaper as the country’s primary source of news.

“We overcame the FCC’s stupid Fairness Doctrine in the 80’s to give us the freedom to pollute people’s minds with our talking points rather than offering a fair depiction of both sides of an argument and we’ll overcome this stupid TikTok trend,” said Peter Henry, a media strategist at CNN. “The truth is, people don’t want to think, they want to be told what to think and who to vote for. That is our burden to bear.”

Newspaper giants have touted this ban as a win for the American job market as it will create hundreds of jobs across the country as paper boys—or, as it is more politically correct to say—paper people.

“I told my kids how exciting it is to see the newspaper industry about to boom again,” said Gary Frank, a boomer. “They’ve spent their entire 20s looking for a job and I said this would be a great opportunity to get their foot in the door at a prestigious company that is a cornerstone of democracy, but all they said was ‘what the fuck is a newspaper’. I’m afraid for the future if these kids don’t even know what a newspaper is.”

As of right now, ByteDance has about six months to sell TikTok, however, it’s believed there will be lengthy court dealings in the upcoming months on the premise that the imminent ban of the social media is unconstitutional under the first amendment, protecting people’s right to free speech.

And this wouldn’t be the first time, either. Last May, TikTok sued the state of Montana after it issued its own ban on the social media app. In November, a federal judge ruled in favor of TikTok and blocked the law before it went into effect.

The difference between these two situations, however, is that Montana attempted to ban the app over privacy and child safety concerns while this federal ban is focused more on national security.

So will TikTok stay, or will it go? Only time will tell. What are your thoughts on this potential ban?

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