Haleluya Hadero of the Associated Press begins her report [Haleluya Hadero for The Associated Press]:

Hearing a lot about Lemon8 lately? You’re not the only one.

I have not heard of Lemon8. Is this going to be another Temu situation?

Ms. Hadero continued:

Amid a looming U.S. ban on TikTok, content creators have been pushing the platform’s sister app. Lemon8 resembles an amalgamation of the types of short-form videos found on TikTok and the picture-perfect aesthetic of Instagram and Pinterest.

Sister? TikTok has siblings other than the for-Chinese version of TikTok (since China does not allow TikTok)?

Like its popular relation, Lemon8 is owned by China-based ByteDance, whose collection of internationally available apps also includes the video editing app CapCut and the photo and art editing app Hypic. In addition, the company operates Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok that follows Beijing’s strict censorship rules.

TikTok should be banned (you were right the first time Mr. President-elect). When it tries to give you a lemon, you should also ban the lemon. When it tries to give you eight lemons, you should ban all eight lemons.

 

According to Eric Lendrum of American Greatness: “A new survey shows that young Americans who frequently use the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok are much more likely to get their news from content creators rather than actual news outlets.” I am long on record as being an early member of the ban TikTok camp, specifically because no other great power in history would allow an adversary to perform live-action social experiments on its youngest citizens. I read this article about young people viewing CCP propaganda as an alternative to “actual news outlets” and thought “yes that is bad, but what is worse is that this is a battle between the resistable force and the movable object.”