I’m Conflicted About the Fate of TikTok
It might be propaganda, but is that a reason to ban it?
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act of 2024, also known as H.R. 7521, after it was unanimously passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee earlier in the week. The bill, which received broad bipartisan support in the House and that President Biden said he would sign if passed, says it aims to protect Americans from applications controlled or owned by countries deemed by the State Department as “foreign adversaries,” which currently includes China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Russia. But clearly, the bill has one target: Chinese-controlled ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
TikTok’s corporate structure is convoluted, even to the U.S. government, apparently: The company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands but has corporate headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles, with TikTok operating subsidiaries in the United States, Australia, Britain, and Singapore to cater to those markets. Development work on the U.S. version of TikTok is done in Singapore and Los Angeles, the company says, and is led by Shou Chew, TikTok’s Singaporean chief executive. TikTok also has a Chinese version called Douyin operated by a separate subsidiary based in China. Both versions, TikTok and Douyin, are ultimately — despite their various subsidiaries and headquarters — owned by ByteDance, a company based and incorporated in Beijing and whose owners are mainly Chinese and global investors and employees.
However, ByteDance, a company operated and headquartered in China is subject to control by the Chinese government — and by extension, the Chinese Communist Party, which rules the country with an iron fist. Moreover, the Chinese government owns a 1 percent stake in ByteDance, which it uses to control the company’s operations. TikTok, the Singaporean-American company, claims that it operates independently from the Chinese-controlled ByteDance and that it does not send any data back to the mother ship in China, but it is also worth noting that because ByteDance is effectively controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, it could be under pressure to not reveal any information about the collusion with the American company. Mr. Chew insists that since 2020, all American user data has been stored on Oracle servers in Texas via a project the company calls “Project Texas.”
Project Texas was established due to the U.S. government’s concerns under former President Donald Trump in late 2020, when Mr. Trump weighed barring the company from operating in the United States after teenage users of the platform coordinated a call center spam attack, booking fake seats at one of his rallies during his 2020 election campaign. Mr. Trump and the Justice Department cited two reasons for the ban: The Trump administration said it believed Americans’ data was being stored in China, on Chinese servers, to which the CCP gives itself access, and that, more importantly, the algorithm was being developed by ByteDance in Beijing, not TikTok in Los Angeles, as the company alluded to. While TikTok confirmed to the Trump administration that user data was, in fact, being stored on American soil, independent from China, the company would not say if the algorithm was controlled by the CCP, presumably because it was still being engineered in China.
To this day, the TikTok algorithms — which serve videos from the website to American users, many of whom are children or teenagers — are mainly programmed and tested in Beijing, at ByteDance’s corporate headquarters where the algorithms are subject to interrogation and meddling by the CCP-controlled Chinese government. TikTok has never denied that; it has only said that the two companies — ByteDance and TikTok — “operate independently.” This algorithmic confusion, along with reports from whistle-blowers inside the company who say ByteDance and TikTok still exchange data and that some data and oversight from Beijing is required for engineering tasks in Los Angeles, has made both parties in Congress increasingly weary of TikTok’s influence on young American minds. Still, though, bills to bar the app from operating in the United States went nowhere through Mr. Biden’s presidency, in part due to dysfunction in Congress.
Then came October 7, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip, murdering approximately 1,200 Israelis and abducting hundreds of hostages. In response, Israel has launched a devastating counteroffensive on Gaza, killing 30,000 Palestinians over five months of war, according to the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. Israel has stated that its objective is to eliminate Hamas, which it says operates in civilian population centers, but as casualties rise, the American public has grown impatient with Israel’s war — and has taken to TikTok to air grievances with both Israel and Mr. Biden, who has expressed steadfast support for the country’s war. TikTok, a platform used by 170 million Americans each month, has played an outsized role in the Israel-Hamas war, with people as young as 13 being exposed to graphic imagery directly from the war. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that the platform was more inclined to show pro-Palestinian videos of the conflict and that it showed violent videos to children even if they didn’t express interest in it.
These reports, along with heightened geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing, reignited calls for a ban on TikTok. As young Americans took to the streets protesting the president’s support for the war, legislators and independent media reports found that many protests were organized on TikTok and that pro-Palestinian, antisemitic content was being poorly moderated by the Chinese company, while pro-Israeli content was taken down at higher rates. Theorists surmised that due to the Chinese’s history of meddling in U.S. presidential elections, the CCP must have been behind the algorithm and moderation changes. TikTok has categorically denied the claims, but nonetheless, with the president’s approval rating dropping due to the war, politicians have somehow concluded that TikTok was the culprit.
TikTok and ByteDance are named in the resolution, but the bill targets any application owned or controlled by one of the listed foreign adversaries. What sets the new bill apart from other attempts to ban TikTok, like the now-defunct Restrict Act, however, is that it does not actually force a ban on TikTok. Rather, the bill forces any company controlled by a foreign adversary to divest the American arm and sell it to an American company (or incorporate it in the United States) within 160 days of the bill’s passing, or by September if the bill were passed this month. In simplified terms, the bill asks any company that an adversary controls to “become American” or simply cease operations in the United States. If adversaries do not divest the companies, mobile operating system makers like Apple and Google, as well as American web hosting companies like Cloudflare are mandated by law to stop hosting the problematic applications. The bill gives authority to the president to enforce the divestitures and applicable financial penalties.
If the bill were to pass the Senate and be signed by Mr. Biden — which seems increasingly unlikely due to opposition from prominent senators — TikTok says that it would be “effectively banned” from operating in the United States. As soon as the bill — which, according to The Wall Street Journal, panicked TikTok executives — was passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee at lightning speed, TikTok went into overdrive, pushing a notification to every TikTok user urging them to enter their ZIP code to contact their representative in hopes that members of Congress would listen to their constituents and vote against the bill. That plan backfired spectacularly and embarrassingly for the company.
Staff members of representatives and senators from all over the country reported being flooded with telephone calls from angry teenagers and young adults at a rate never seen before — all at once, as the notification was sent to TikTok’s users. They all had a message, reading from the same template: save TikTok. Immediately, representatives, Republican and Democratic alike, took to the House floor to vote on the bill after Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana called a vote on Wednesday — an unusual move for the amateur leader. Only hard-right and progressive Democrats voted against the measure, which passed 352 to 65 amongst moderates in a stunning display of bipartisanship unseen on Capitol Hill in recent history. Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the former speaker, nodded along with hard-right Republicans such as Representative Chip Roy of Texas, while progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York dissented, with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez saying the bill was “incredibly rushed.” Many on Capitol Hill who hadn’t decided on the bill were alerted of the calls and became vehemently anti-TikTok overnight.
The campaign from TikTok was an abysmal disaster for the company since it highlighted to members of Congress the total control the supposed Chinese government has over the American public. Suddenly, thanks to one push notification, people who had never called their representatives previously were flooding phone lines, keeping staffers busy for hours as they noted down names and took telephone numbers. The incident affirmed the decisions of representatives who had already decided how to vote on the bill and expedited its passing in the House on Wednesday. Immediately, pundits and politicians used the notification to illustrate to the American public how a Chinese company had exerted such a strong influence over the country’s youth, and TikTok was battered and beaten by legislators from both sides as Mr. Chew landed in Washington to lobby against the bill’s passing in the Senate. Mr. Chew also posted a video to TikTok describing the bill as a “total ban,” which is factually incorrect — it is only a ban if ByteDance refuses to divest TikTok. The description by Mr. Chew further trashed TikTok’s public relations, as critics pointed out that Mr. Chew could easily sell TikTok and avoid a ban.
That brings us to the current dilemma: On one hand, Congress is treating TikTok like any other piece of propaganda, forcing it to sell to an American company to prevent foreign interference in U.S. politics while also resolving data privacy concerns regulators have decried for years. On the other hand, however, the U.S. government risks violating the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans who, by the nature of the First Amendment, have the constitutional right to consume and contribute to propaganda and data mining by foreign adversaries. If Congress wanted to prevent American data from ending up in the hands of communist dictators, it could pass a data privacy law that would also affect American companies like Meta, Facebook’s parent, which has snooped on the data of Americans for years to the chagrin of Mr. Trump, who has come out against the latest measure due to his disaffection for Meta. Mr. Trump later amended his statements and came out in support of the legislation on Friday during an interview with Fox News.
Either Congress wants to force TikTok to sell itself and is using TikTok’s insistence on the bill being a “total ban” as proof that the CCP has an interest in maintaining its control over the service — thus adding steam to the argument that a ban is in order on the grounds of propaganda — or Congress is deliberately hiding something from the public as Ocasio-Cortez suggested in a post of hers on the social media website X. While the first justification is a blatant and despicable violation of the First Amendment, the second argument could be potentially convincing, even to TikTok’s most ardent supporters. The only problem is that Congress has not told the public what its major justification is for banning a product half the country uses. “Propaganda” is not a reason to ban something that enables the free expression of hundreds of millions of Americans, and for that reason, I’m very worried about the fate of TikTok — especially in an election year that is critical for Democrats.
Here is the argument for banning TikTok and the argument against banning TikTok — and why they’re both sound.
For: The U.S. Government Has a Responsibility to Protect Its Citizens From Propaganda
The most damning argument for forcing TikTok to sell to an American company is not about data privacy, since Congress could easily pass a law akin to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, to protect Americans’ data from being sold to hungry overseas governments. Doing so would be within the boundaries of the First Amendment and would prevent foreign surveillance by China — something Washington has taken seriously in recent years. The more interesting — and potentially also more flawed — argument, however, is banning TikTok due to its Chinese ownership and the CCP’s control over the TikTok algorithm. I’m very skeptical of this case, even though there is a historical precedent for it. Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge and lawyer, wrote on Wednesday: “But what exactly did the House select committee see in its secure briefing that led them to vote 50–0 in favor of the bill that would ban the app?” referring to the House Select Committee on the CCP which sent the bill to the Energy and Commerce Committee.
During the second American Red Scare after World War II, the Cold War, and the era of McCarthyism, the government became increasingly skeptical of communism and its spread in the United States. To combat this, it actively infringed on the First Amendment rights of many Americans suspected of harboring communist beliefs, justifying its actions on the premise of national security. Former Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin actively encouraged the Justice Department to take action against suspected communists and helped establish the House Un-American Activities Committee, which targeted Hollywood after executives complained of communists infiltrating the industry. Professors and academics were investigated for alleged communism, membership in leftist and socialist political groups was grounds for investigation, and publishers were barred from distributing communist material. In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act, which mandated communist parties register with the Justice Department. (None registered.)
Each one of these actions was a blatant violation of the First Amendment in hindsight, but nonetheless, in the 1951 case of Dennis v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled 6–2 that investigations of the Communist Party of the United States of America were constitutional. The Supreme Court did later rule in 1957 that HUAC’s investigative practices violated the Fifth Amendment, but for many years, a nationwide fight against communism — political speech that should have been protected under the First Amendment — was legal, constitutional, and encouraged by the government due to national security concerns. The government, after World War II, didn’t want to run the risk of Americans being radicalized by the growing Soviet Union, and so fought heavily against the spread and distribution of communist media — especially when it originated from Soviet-aligned countries. The United States banned newspapers and television from Eastern countries and heavily questioned Eastern European and Asian immigrants during the second Red Scare — it’s all history.
Instead of the Soviet Union, the U.S. government is now targeting China, a communist dictatorship known for meddling in U.S. elections. And with a hugely consequential one approaching this November, the government — both sides of it, Republican and Democratic — is understandably concerned about foreign influence. Banning propaganda does not come without precedent in the West: Britain on Wednesday outlined new laws barring foreign-owned newspapers from distribution in the country after Emiratis planned to buy The Telegraph. If Congress were to operate on legislative precedent, i.e., based on laws that Congress previously passed during trying times of public disorder, yes, the new law preventing Chinese ownership of TikTok/ByteDance makes sense. It is almost certain that the CCP, a foreign adversary, has control over 170 million Americans — and Congress might have already even confirmed it. Such control poses a national security threat to the United States, and thus, just like during the Red Scare, the United States must “Americanize” TikTok.
Moreover, there could be reasons — as Mr. Patel and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez suggested — that Congress is not allowed to disclose to the American public yet that rationalize the forced divestiture of TikTok. Again, for the hard right and left to agree on something in the House is truly a feat, so there might be information that the government simply has not uncovered yet. That information could very well pertain to national security: The Chinese and Russian governments — which are often in cahoots with each other — are eager for information relating to the way Americans think and interact with one another. With TikTok given access to the image libraries and location data of hundreds of millions of Americans, the CCP has a suspiciously good reason to lobby against TikTok’s ban. The information could be used to collude with politicians, influence business dealings and trade, and steal patents and other ideas. TikTok’s privacy policy states that it does not sell information to China or any other partner — and Mr. Chew during his testimony in front of Congress last year has repeatedly insisted that Americans’ TikTok data is stored on American soil — but what if Congress has found evidence to the contrary?
And then, perhaps most incriminatingly of all, TikTok has exclusively — and annoyingly — referred to this bill as a “total ban,” when such a characterization is entirely incorrect. As I said, TikTok’s PR handling of this recent crisis has been disastrous for the company, with key executives publicly admitting, although indirectly, that they would rather have TikTok banned in the United States than divest it. Why are TikTok executives so keen on letting the Chinese bear control over an immensely popular product worth millions of dollars? Executives could easily cash in by selling it to Oracle or Microsoft, paying employees hefty bonuses, and allowing the company to turn a profit for once. American companies are eager to gain access to the trove of data TikTok possesses, and many American investors have signaled that they are willing to purchase the platform for more than it is worth. Yet, even though there is an overwhelming American interest in a product half of the country uses, Beijing refuses to relinquish its control over the data.
TikTok has sent some of its most popular TikTokers to Washington to lobby against the bill, instructing them, though tacitly, to position it to lawmakers as a “total ban,” when in actuality, all the company needs to do is sell itself to an American investor. TikTok has essentially constructed an elaborate propaganda campaign atop its platform that is already being accused of serving as a Chinese propaganda and surveillance device, sending hoards of aggravated teenagers straight to the congressional phone lines — all for something that is not even remotely true. Moreover, Beijing has taken to the press to air its grievances with the measure — as if the U.S. government will be convinced by one of its top adversaries’ disapproval — with He Yadong, a spokesman for the Chinese commerce ministry, telling The Financial Times in a statement that Washington should “stop unfairly suppressing foreign companies,” even though China literally does the same, as pointed out by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who served in the Trump administration and has expressed interest in purchasing TikTok.
Both China and TikTok — which continuously reiterates that it is an independent firm, operating away from Chinese control — have expressed the same opinion: the U.S. government should stop suppressing Chinese companies. If that is not collusion, nothing is. From the outside, and using history to influence the future — essentially the entire basis of the conservative movement — TikTok should have been banned three years ago. The company has continuously yet accidentally supported claims that it is Chinese propaganda, and the U.S. government should be within its authority to cut off Beijing’s constant stream of American information.
Against: Americans Have a Constitutional Right to View Propaganda
What I just outlined about TikTok — how the CCP has effectively vested operational control over its algorithm, how the push notification campaign underscored China’s ability to influence politics in the United States, and how TikTok may serve as a data mining platform for the Chinese government — does not change one key principle of American democracy: the First Amendment. Americans have a fundamental, constitutional right to engage with, spread, and even create anti-U.S. propaganda; petition their government for changes, even if a foreign adversary encouraged them to do so; and sell their data to foreign adversaries, even if discouraged by the federal government. All of these activities are protected under the First Amendment, the bedrock of free speech in the United States. During the Red Scare, activists sued the Justice Department for enforcing anti-communist laws that they said infringed on their First Amendment rights — and they won. The Supreme Court struck down the government’s silencing of communism, and to this day, the Communist Party of the United States of America exists as a political party — though not a thriving one. Free speech won; government regulation of speech lost.
TikTok being a fundamental danger to the United States’ national security may be true, but Americans’ ability to engage with and take part in that danger is their right. Individual cases of lawlessness can be prosecuted, but ultimately, it is between Congress and TikTok — not the Americans who use it and elect Congress — to defend national security. If TikTok is found violating federal data privacy laws — of which there are very few, but there are some when it pertains to security and adversarial governments — the Justice Department should prosecute it as if TikTok were any other foreign or U.S. company. Instead of writing laws that protect American interests, Congress has decided to take a shortcut: hampering the free speech rights of hundreds of millions of Americans. If Congress was genuinely concerned about foreign threats to the United States, it would investigate and prosecute those threats. Facebook, during the 2016 presidential election, sold data to Cambridge Analytica, a British firm, for political advertising, and Cambridge used the data to influence the election in favor of Mr. Trump, who ultimately won — plainly foreign political interference. Facebook was not obstructed from operating in the United States, as doing so would be a First Amendment violation; it instead was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for violating privacy laws. That is how the executive branch of the U.S. government functions.
The First Amendment emphasizes that its existence should not affect how the government protects its citizens — its job is to instead protect citizens from their government. The claim that Americans are allowed to view propaganda might sound ludicrous at first read, but in actuality, it is entirely true, because if the government was allowed to block so-called “propaganda,” it would use that power to block all speech it did not like — a classic First Amendment violation. TikTok might be propaganda, but what is defined as “propaganda?” According to the State Department, it is material created by countries on that list of “foreign adversaries” the U.S. government simply does not like for a variety of (good) reasons. Congress, and by extension, the executive branch, are both given enormous power to protect and defend the civil liberties of the American people, and an important part of that duty is to defend the integrity, culture, and security of the United States. Congress has every right to subpoena TikTok, investigate its ties to the CCP, understand how it manipulates Americans, and then fine TikTok any amount of money it deems sufficient to prevent Americans’ data from being sold to and used by foreign adversaries — something that is already a crime under U.S. law because it is integral to the security of the nation’s people.
Instead of taking its job seriously, the government has taken the easy route: threatening free political expression because it does not agree with it. That expression might be propaganda, but propaganda is protected speech — the Supreme Court has said so. A common argument against this opinion is that Congress is not banning TikTok, but rather simply forcing a sale, which it is within its authority to do as a body of the government that regulates the market. That argument is simply false: If this bill told TikTok, “Sell to an American company or face financial penalties,” then yes, it would be regulation of the free market. But forcing a total ban if the accused business does not obey congressional instructions is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. It unnecessarily involves ordinary civilians in a matter between the government and a business providing services — and when civilians are involved, Congress must take extra care to protect and defend the Constitution. Threatening a TikTok ban — just simply threatening one — is three steps too far. The government’s job is to regulate the market, not impose its beliefs on the American people — and banning any tool, large or small, that is used by Americans to express themselves is thereby an action by Congress of imposing its beliefs on citizens.
This stance is not pro-TikTok, it is simply pro-American. TikTok, as outlined earlier, is a bad company that abuses its power in the United States to indoctrinate grade-school children with CCP-curated propaganda while collecting adults’ data and providing it to China to meddle in presidential elections. It is a criminal enterprise that deserves to be punished and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Keyword: the law. You cannot change the law — the First Amendment — unless you amend the Constitution, an impossible task in today’s political climate, so it is best to instead use what the law already says to hold bad actors accountable for their actions. TikTok has spied on American journalists to uncover whistle-blowers; it has engaged in poor content moderation practices risking the lives of the nation’s youngest; and it has evidently sent data back home to one of the United States’ most formidable enemies — and all of these actions are fundamentally anti-American, and more importantly, illegal. The Justice Department could and should immediately prosecute TikTok like it has Google and Meta, but it does not have the authority — despite what a majority of rank-and-file representatives say — to ignore the free speech rights of half of the U.S. population.
TikTok has turned itself into its own enemy, lying to the American public and Congress, using foreign influence to petition the U.S. government, and employing literal espionage to punish journalists. It is not the “good guy” in this case, per se — it never has been, and it never will be. TikTok has proved its harshest critics correct by sending a notification to millions of users blatantly lying about the consequences of a federal law, and for that, it deserves to face hefty consequences — but not at the expense of the American people. If TikTok was any other company with ownership from any other government, a ban would not even be discussed on Capitol Hill, even if that imaginary company breached the most severe data privacy laws. If Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told the world tomorrow that his company had been selling Meta users’ data straight to the CCP, the Justice Department would censure his company, but it would never even begin thinking of banning the platforms millions of Americans use to express themselves. But the government has yet again cut itself an excuse due to its utter destain for China, a blunder that it will soon come to regret if the bill is signed into law and angry teenagers sue the federal government.
The United States has always held foreign-owned businesses to higher standards, but those higher standards have never resulted in a legal, constitutional addition to the law. During the Red Scares, both the first and second, the U.S. government tried to silence communism in the United States and failed spectacularly. It failed for a good reason: If the government gave itself the ability to silence speech controlled by governments it does not like, American democracy would fall apart. What if, someday, a nation that the United States has currently not deemed as an adversary launches a breakthrough invention that puts U.S. technology to shame? It launches a new social media platform and advertises its invention for millions of Americans to see, but the United States does not like its citizens viewing inventions from other countries. So, it marks the country as an adversary and forces the platform to sell to an American company, using its newly minted powers, effectively ceasing the promotion of the breakthrough. Such an act would not only be a First Amendment violation but would also throw the United States into regression. Americans could be subjected to a dictatorship because the new bill gives too much power to the president.
The most popular counterclaim to this is that China does the same — that China silences speech from adversaries like the United States to protect its people and that the United States needs to do the same. The United States and its governance structure is not even remotely similar to the Chinese’s — I simply cannot stress this enough. China is run by President Xi Jinping, a de facto communist dictator who rules China like a kingdom to the point where search engines have had to block the term “Winnie the Pooh” because it is used as an insult toward the president. If the Justice Department under Mr. Biden ordered Google to block the term “Genocide Joe,” Republicans would light the Capitol on fire, but nevertheless, that is precisely how Mr. Xi governs his country. The Chinese mentality of banning things deemed “unsafe” for the American public is plainly unconstitutional in the United States. Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington this week have used the “China did it” argument numerous times when it is entirely flawed. If the “China did it” mentality was successful in the United States — much less the West in general — then Congress would be out of a job because the very essence of a democracy is a system of checks and balances coupled with free speech.
Western-operated businesses, especially ones headquartered in the United States, are not owned nor controlled by the U.S. government for obvious reasons, yet the CCP treats them as such. By contrast, China owns a slice of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, and the two evidently collude regularly, as demonstrated and verified by many studies and media reports. But what sets the United States and China apart is that the United States is a liberal democracy with free speech at its core, and China is a communist dictatorship. This week’s bill uses China as a role model while lambasting China’s control over a crucial enterprise on the internet — it is a disturbing double standard for Washington to employ, and one that should not be encouraged.
The 352 representatives who voted in support of the bill on Wednesday did have one thing correct — a core tenet of the bill: TikTok is a national security disaster. It is almost certainly true; Congress does not even have to prove it. But again, as Mr. Patel wrote, for the government to threaten a ban on a product so many Americans use to express themselves, the government must bring its receipts to the table — or it simply runs the risk of becoming China 2.0. I’m sympathetic to the data privacy argument, which is why Congress should pass data protection laws instead of taking the easy route and slamming the gavel on the sound block and exclaiming, “The resolution is now adopted,” stripping away the rights of millions of Americans and subjecting the government to a long, arduous and inevitable legal battle. The government already has the laws to protect Americans — now, it is time for it to enforce them.
The resolution is now headed for the Senate, where Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has not indicated if he will bring the bill to the floor for a vote or if he would refer it to a committee for further talks, a surefire way of all but killing the measure. But already, prominent hard-right and progressive senators have expressed their opposition to it, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who has said he does not think “Congress should be trying to take away the First Amendment rights” of 170 million Americans. The Senate has historically been less proactive in taking up “Big Tech” legislation and also faces the hurdle of the filibuster, a quirk in the Senate rules that requires 60 senators at minimum to vote to end debate on a bill. Purely due to the politics of the Senate, I do not think the bill will clear the filibuster threshold, though it probably has enough votes for passage. And I also think Democrats will wisen up and quickly realize that banning an application millions use during an election year crucial for the party will wind up being a political disaster that, candidly speaking, will most likely cost Mr. Biden re-election.
Politics, the role of government, and Chinese influence on the United States are all complicated topics that have been written about and discussed at length for decades. But currently, the U.S. government needs to understand what is at stake with this bill: democracy. Yes, I’m conflicted on the fate of TikTok — there are some good points for forcing its divestiture, but the First Amendment is mighty and important. Whatever TikTok’s fate may be, we will find out before Election Day. Just don’t call your senator telling them to vote against the bill, please.
An update was made on March 16, 2024, at 1:38 a.m.: Former President Donald Trump has now come out in support of the latest legislation in an interview with Fox News on Friday. This article has been updated to reflect the latest developments.
