TikTok – a video-based social media platform with 170 million American users – may soon be banned in the United States. Claiming concerns regarding Chinese propaganda and data security, Congress passed a law that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, must be sold to a government-approved American company or be completely banned. Lawyers representing the country appeared before the Supreme Court Friday to fight against the ban in the name of free speech.
However, the ban would not only severely limit the voices of millions of Americans – many of whom are young and college-aged, but it also creates a complicated precedent about how the United States controls internet-space.
American leaders are concerned TikTok is censoring and/or promoting videos about certain political events since, as a Chinese company, it is subject to the tight chokehold the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has on its country’s commerce.
However, American social media companies have also been accused of pushing political material. We all know how algorithms work. If someone interacts with a political post, then the app –whether it be Instagram or TikTok – is going to recommend more political content.
With the excess amount of misinformation, AI-generated information and opinions, it can be hard to decipher what is true. Meta, the company which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced just last week that it would be removing its fact-checking features, making understanding political rhetoric even more difficult. While the concerns about censorship and propaganda are legitimate, it’s not an “only TikTok” problem. Virtually EVERY social media platform is vulnerable to foreign manipulation to some extent.
An editorial in Time Magazine calls attention to the 1964 Supreme Court case Lamont v. Postmaster General in which the Court ruled the government couldn’t stop foreign propaganda from being sent to Americans as citizens should have the right to interpret information for themselves. Therefore, even if TikTok was promoting political videos, a U.S. ban of those videos is still akin to censorship. Deciding when political rhetoric becomes propaganda is an extremely slippery slope, especially when it comes to foreign content in a country that prides itself on Freedom of Speech.
The second accusation TikTok faces is one of privacy and data security. Lawmakers are worried that ByteDance is gathering information, like users’ location, that could become available to the CCP.
It goes without saying America has a huge data privacy problem, but the government has had ample time to develop and pass federal data protections to prevent this type of information being collected. If lawmakers were that concerned with how Americans interact with Chinese companies, there would be a broader focus than just a media platforms. Why are we not banning Chinese-shopping apps like Shein and Temu, which collect sensitive data from users such as addresses and banking information?
Yet, instead of developing public policies on how to interact with Chinese companies or ways to protect American data, the government wants to solely focus on TikTok – which is conveniently an app that has given millions of Americans a platform and has helped break up the Google and Meta communication monopolies.
A ban is lazy, and it jeopardizes a culture of free speech that has empowered millions to communicate, express themselves, discuss ideas and share opinions. Its novel structure and premise have especially given young people a space to feel free to be themselves and gives them access to a mass audience, connecting users across the country and the globe in ways Instagram and X simply haven’t done.
Stifling these voices would be a terrible act of censorship. The government should develop real public policy requiring a certain level of transparency among all social media platforms, which would be profoundly more impactful and would have a much less devastating effect on Americans.
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