Photo courtesy of Nik via Unsplash
Recently, the House of Representatives passed a bill to ban TikTok in the United States. They are concerned about the social media app’s parent company, ByteDance, which is based in China. The concern is that due to Chinese national security laws, ByteDance could theoretically be forced to give up any kind of user data that China may want.
The bill has made it to the Senate, and if they pass it, President Biden has said he plans on signing it into law, according to AP News. The quick passage of this bill should be very alarming to you, as it is to me. I would go as far as to say the bill in question is a direct violation of the First Amendment. Additionally, I doubt this law would stop at just TikTok.
This is not the first time the government has tried to ban TikTok. They have had an ongoing (and so far, losing) battle with the app since former President Donald Trump was in office in 2020. Even last year, the House tried passing the “RESTRICT Act,” which would give the government the power to “identify and mitigate foreign threats to information and communications technology, products and services.” However, according to congress.gov, it has yet to move past simply being introduced.
The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” is not just trying to ban TikTok, it is attempting to ban any application from ByteDance, at least until they sell the application in question.
The exact language of the bill is “to protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications, such as TikTok and any successor application or service and any other application or service developed or provided by ByteDance Ltd. or an entity under the control of ByteDance Ltd.”
The bill later states that it gives the government the power to ban any application that they deem is controlled by a “foreign adversary.” There is no black-and-white definition for what a foreign adversary is here. Sure, you could pick out a few examples, but there isn’t a concrete standard of what makes a country adversarial.
So, what is stopping the government from just picking and choosing who gets a pass and who doesn’t? Better yet, if this bill does pass, what stops the government from passing another bill that takes out the requirement of being a “foreign adversary?”
This new bill feels like another attempt for the government to control what we as Americans can view while being disguised as protecting national security, akin to that of the Patriot Act of 2001. The Patriot Act was passed just 45 days after the events of 9/11, and it heightened national security within the U.S. However, many believe that the law violated the citizens’ right to privacy.
The concern over the Chinese government demanding user data is real, but let’s not pretend that American data hasn’t been sold to others before by other Americans. Mark Zuckerberg notoriously got in deep trouble for selling user data from Facebook in 2019.
Even so, ByteDance has always been a Chinese corporation, meaning China could hypothetically have always had as much user data as it wanted – but there are no credible reports of Chinese authorities taking that data.
Many state representatives have been defending their choice of backing the bill as them just trying to force a sale. News flash: that will not happen. The app has over a billion monthly users, while 150 million of those users are American. If you were ByteDance, would you sell your multi-billion-dollar product over being threatened by 15% of your user base? I know I wouldn’t.
While ByteDance may not suffer that much damage, many people make their livelihood by creating videos for the app. TikTok pays two to four cents per 1,000 views, which may not sound like a lot. But if you add up all the views received by creators who post daily, that’s some serious money lost through no fault of their own.
Whatever your personal biases towards TikTok are, banning it is not a good thing. A ban of the platform will directly limit your First Amendment rights in the interest of “national security.” While there is currently the benefit of the doubt, I don’t believe it is completely out of the question to see the government attempt to weaponize this law against other apps if it were to pass.
The precedent this law will set is an awful one, and the First Amendment must stay protected in this instance.
