Trump, DeSantis, somebody! TikTok has reeled me in, and it's not about 'national security.'

I’m all for banning TikTok. The sooner the better.

I’m not worried about the possibility that the Chinese government is gathering data on my whereabouts through ByteDance, the parent company for this popular video-sharing app. Or that China is slyly using this platform with its one billion regular users to spread misinformation and propaganda to me.

My main beef with TikTok is that it causes me to watch too many videos of people fishing.

This is very disappointing. I don’t fish, and have no interest in fishing. But show me a 2-minute video of a guy struggling with a bent fishing rod, trying to reel in some unseen big fish — a “lunker” as they say — from his bobbing boat or a pier, and I’m as hooked as the poor creature with the barb in its mouth.

Why? I don’t know. But this Chinese company has figured it out. Somewhere, in the evil bowels of the TikTok algorithms is the knowledge that I have an infinite and strange proclivity to be rendered immobile while watching fishing videos.

Sure, I could help myself by immediately swiping past these fishing videos but once the bait is cast, I’m paralyzed.

So, whenever I select the app on my phone, in no time at all it starts sending me videos of people fishing, and once again, I postpone my life to see what materializes from the depths, usually in the final 10 seconds of the video.

These videos, for the most part, are lots of dead time that features the fisherman going “Whoo!” or “It’s a beast” while his hype man/friend yells “Let him run!” And despite all the furious reeling in, the fish doesn’t make its appearance until well into Act 3.

(Which, by the way, also mimics the plot of the greatest fishing novel, Moby Dick. In Herman Melville’s opus, the white whale doesn’t materialize until Chapter 133.)

In some of these fishing videos, the fish gets away in the end, which leads me to be both pleased and feeling like I do after being sucked into clicking through one of those online ads for pills that masquerade as some health secret about a magical vegetable.

Either way, it’s an enormous time suck for me, when I could be better spending my time watching other TikTok videos of old clips from the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, hard-fought professional pickleball rallies and dachshunds playing three-card monte.

Is TikTok making me worse at Wordle?

After all, I’ve got places to go and a daily Wordle to solve. (Don’t want to blow my streak.) So I shouldn’t be sitting there waiting to see whether the circling sharks will eat the hooked amberjack before it gets reeled in, or “boated” as we in the fishing-video community say.

This leads me to my main beef with TikTok: I’m pretty sure that TikTok is making me stupid.

(This is point in the column where some readers say to themselves, “You were already there, bozo!”)

And if by some chance TikTok is not making me stupid, it’s certainly trying hard. So, I can see why state and federal lawmakers are talking about banning TikTok, although they say it’s for “national security” reasons.

I’m guessing they’re just too embarrassed to say the real reason: That it’s sapping the productivity of the American people, one amateur video at a time.

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TikTok is already banned on devices associated with the military and in some colleges. Montana was the first state to try to ban it completely for its residents but a court ruled it in violation of the free speech guarantees in the U.S. Constitution.

DeSantis already tried banning TikTok

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill last year that banned TikTok from public school and state government servers. The Florida Legislature this month passed a bill to ban kids who are 13 years old or younger from opening TikTok accounts and required parental permission for those accounts for 14- and 15-year-olds.

Former President Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok through executive order when he was president, but now he’s a TikTok cheerleader since meeting at Mar-a-Lago this month with hedge fund manager and political mega-donor, Jeff Yass, who has a major stake in the social media app.

“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Trump said in a call-in interview on the CNBC TV network. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”

Trump has also credited his reversal on TikTok by saying that hurting TikTok would just lead people to Facebook.

“I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump said.

Translation: Facebook called out Trump for his debunked fraud claims about the 2020 election.

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Despite Trump’s revised opinion of TikTok, a bill in the U.S. House that requires the Chinese company to sell the app or face a ban in the United States has been advancing with bi-partisan support.

I wonder, though, if lawmakers have their hearts in this. Maybe they’re all watching fishing videos too.

President Joe Biden said he would sign a bill that would ban TikTok but that was weeks after his campaign opened a TikTok account, and Biden posted his own TikTok video talking about the SuperBowl.

I tried to disengage from TikTok last year and deleted it from my apps. But I’m back on, mostly so I could post my own video versions of my columns.

They’re not exactly going viral. Maybe it’s because TikTok is a young person’s medium, and I resemble an election poll worker from a condo precinct in West Delray.

But it just could be that I need to be better about getting people’s attention in this distracting world.

Maybe if I talked while fishing …

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers chain.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Ban TikTok? I'm all for it. The sooner the better