The Grim Reality of Banning TikTok

The U.S. government, once again, wants to ban TikTok. The app has become an
incontrovertible force on American phones since it launched in 2016, defining the
sounds and sights of pandemic-era culture. TikTok’s burst on the scene also
represented a first for American consumers, and officials—a popular social media
app that wasn’t started on Silicon Valley soil, but in China.
On March 13, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to force TikTok’s
Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok or else the app will be banned
on American phones. The government will fine the two major mobile app stores and
any cloud hosting companies to ensure that Americans cannot access the app.
While fashioned as a forced divestiture on national security grounds, let’s be real:
This is a ban. The intent has always been to ban TikTok, to punish it and its users
without solving any of the underlying data privacy issues lawmakers claim to care
about. Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw said it outright: “No one is trying to disguise
anything… We want to ban TikTok.”
But, as such, a ban of TikTok would eliminate an important place for Americans to
speak and be heard. It would be a travesty for the free speech rights of hundreds of
millions of Americans who depend on the app to communicate, express themselves,
and even make a living. And perhaps more importantly, it would further balkanize the
global internet and disconnect us from the world.
Read more: What to Know About the Bill That Could Get TikTok Banned in the U.S.
This isn’t the first time the government has tried to ban TikTok: In 2021, former
President Donald Trump issued an executive order that was halted in federal court
when a Trump-appointed judge found it was “arbitrary and capricious” because it
failed to consider other means of dealing with the problem. Another judge found that
the national security threat posted by TikTok was “phrased in the hypothetical.” When
the state of Montana tried to ban the app in 2023, a federal judge found it “oversteps
state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users,” with a “pervasive
undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment.”
Trump also opened a national security review with the power to force a divestment,
something Biden has continued to this day with no resolution; and last year,
lawmakers looked poised to pass a bill banning TikTok, but lost steam after a
high-profile grilling of its top executive. (Trump has done an about-face on the issue
and recently warned that banning TikTok will only help its U.S. rivals like Meta.)
TikTok stands accused of being a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party, guzzling
up sensitive user data and sending it to China. There’s not much evidence to
suggest that’s true, except that their parent company ByteDance is a Chinese
company, and China’s government has its so-called private sector in a chokehold. In
order to stay compliant, you have to play nice.
In all of this, it’s important to remember that America is not China. America doesn't
have a Great Firewall with our very own internet free from outside influences.
America allows all sorts of websites that the government likes, dislikes, and fears
onto our computers. So there’s an irony in allowing Chinese internet giants onto
America’s internet when, of course, American companies like Google and Meta’s
services aren’t allowed on Chinese computers.
And because of America’s robust speech protections under the First Amendment,
the U.S. finds itself playing a different ballgame than the Chinese government in this
moment. These rights protect Americans against the U.S. government, not from
corporations like TikTok, Meta, YouTube, or Twitter, despite the fact that they do have
outsized influence over modern communication. No, the First Amendment says that
the government cannot stop you from speaking without a damned good reason. In
other words, you’re protected against Congress—not TikTok.

The clearest problem with a TikTok ban is it would immediately wipe out a platform
where 170 million Americans broadcast their views and receive
information—sometimes about political happenings. In an era of mass polarization,
shutting off the app would mean shutting down the ways in which millions of
people—even those with unpopular views—speak out on issues they care about.
The other problem is that Americans have the constitutional right to access all sorts
of information—even if it’s deemed to be foreign propaganda. There’s been little
evidence to suggest that ByteDance is influencing the flow of content at the behest
of the Chinese government, though there’s some reports that are indeed worrying,
including reports that TikTok censored videos related to the Tiananmen Square
massacre, Tibetan independence, and the banned group Falun Gong.
Still, the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that Americans have the right to receive what
the government deems to be foreign propaganda. In Lamont v. Postmaster General,
for instance, the Court ruled that the government couldn’t halt the flow of Soviet
propaganda through the mail. The Court essentially said that the act of the
government stepping in and banning propaganda would be akin to censorship, and
the American people need to be free to evaluate these transgressive ideas for
themselves.
Further, the government has repeatedly failed to pass any federal data privacy
protections that would address the supposed underlying problem of TikTok gobbling
up troves of U.S. user data and handing it to a Chinese parent company. Biden only
made moves in February 2024 to prevent data brokers from selling U.S. user data to
foreign adversaries like China, arguably a problem much bigger than one app. But
the reality is that the government has long been more interested in banning a media
company than dealing with a real public policy issue.
There is legitimate concern in Washington and elsewhere that it’s not the
government that controls so much of America’s speech, but private companies like
those bred in Silicon Valley. But the disappearance of TikTok would further empower
media monopolists like Google and Meta, who already control about half of all U.S.
digital ad dollars, and give them a tighter choke hold over our communication.
There’s already a paucity of platforms where people speak; removing TikTok would
eliminate one of the most important alternatives we have.
Since it launched in 2016, TikTok has been the most influential social media app in
the world, not because it affects public policy or necessarily creates
monoculture—neither are particularly true, in fact—but because it has given people a
totally different way to spend time online. In doing so, it disrupted the monopolies of
American tech companies like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and
forced every rival to in some way mimic its signature style. There’s Facebook and
Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat Spotlight, and every other app seems
to be an infinitely-scrolling video these days.
Still, Americans choose to use TikTok and their conversations will not easily port over
to another platform in the event of it being banned. Instead, cutting through the
connective tissue of the app will sever important ways that Americans—especially
young Americans—are speaking at a time when those conversations are as rich as
ever.
The reality is that if Congress wanted to solve our data privacy problems, they would
solve our data privacy problems. But instead, they want to ban TikTok, so they’ve
found a way to try and do so. The bill will proceed to the Senate floor, then to the
president’s desk, and then it will land in the U.S. court system. At that point, our First
Amendment will once again be put to the test—a free speech case that’s very much
not in the abstract, but one whose results will affect 170 million Americans who just
want to use an app and have their voices be heard.

https://time.com/6952889/tiktok-ban-freedom-of-speech-essay/
impossible to doubt because obviously true incontrovertible

to break or separate, especially by cutting sever

the fact that there is too little of something paucity

to use a lot of your supply of something, usually money gobble sth up

having some of the same qualities akin

to destroy something completely wipe out

strong robust

because someone has asked or ordered you to do something at the behest of

willing to do what other people want you to do compliant

a way of connecting two places, systems, etc. a conduit

to break a rule, law, etc infringe

DIVIDE, COMPARTMENTALIZE balkanize

to give a new appearance to a person or thing, especially in order to hide its true
form disguise

something that fails to represent the values and qualities that it is intended to
represent, in a way that is shocking or offensive a travesty

the act of selling something, especially a business or part of a business, or of no

longer investing money in something divestiture