TikTok may be in trouble: The US House of Representatives has passed legislation that would force ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of the popular social media app, to sell it to a US-based company or it will be banned in the US . The vote it was 352-65. President Joe Biden has indicated that he will sign the legislation, so now it’s just a question of whether the Senate will choose to act.
The vote’s approval margin and the bipartisan nature of the legislation might suggest it is popular. This is certainly the frame adopted by Republican supporters. Oren Cass, a former adviser to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and a national conservative political thinker, described libertarians who oppose the anti-TikTok legislation as “severely isolated” and “damaging their credibility in the conservative coalition.”
1/ It cannot be overstated how severely isolated libertarians are in this fight on TikTok and how much their kicking and screaming is damaging their credibility in the conservative coalition. ????
— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) March 12, 2024
On the other hand, three of the right’s most prominent political and media figures oppose the legislation. I am Tucker Carlson, Elon MuskAND…former President Donald Trump. They each railed against the federal government’s misguided efforts to police social media. Musk said the bill would lead to “censorship and control.” Carlson worried that the feds might use this new authority to take similar action against X (formerly Twitter). Trump, who previously supported banning TikTok, is now worried that it would hurt his youth in the 2024 presidential election — an upset to be sure, but at least directionally correct.
The bill was also opposed by some of the most conservative members of the House (as well as some of the members further to the left): Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.), but also Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.), Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), and so on.
What this really shows is that the battle on TikTok is Not a battle between libertarians and everyone else; instead, it is a battle between various members of the bipartisan establishment in Washington, D.C., who see direct government intervention as the answer to every problem, and another group of people – libertarians included – who recognize that this power is likely is abused.
Various dubious topics have been deployed against TikTok, but this time the establishment’s logic is that the app’s Chinese owners are linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and therefore poses a national security risk. To give credence to this argument, it is true that the CCP is an authoritarian threat; the Chinese government it absolutely puts pressure on TikTok to censor content about Tiananmen Square, the Falun Gong religious sect and criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Americans who get their news primarily from TikTok should keep this in mind.
Of course, the US government did Also pressured American tech companies to censor content on social media. Thanks to Twitter files, Facebook filesand other independent investigations, we know that multiple federal agencies, including the FBI, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Homeland Security, and even the White House, have directed social media platforms to delete Contrarian content related to the election, Hunter Biden, COVID-19, and other topics. When Joe Biden decided that companies had not been sufficiently deferential to his pandemic-related dictates, he they accused them of killing people and threatened to take action against them.
If Congress really wanted to do something about government censorship of social media content, lawmakers could rein in the feds. They could reduce funding to agencies involved in wrongdoing, they could fire violators, and they could create guidelines for bureaucrats.
Instead, they are singularly focused on TikTok.
The House-passed legislation would apply to any social media company designated as “application controlled by a foreign adversary”. US law currently defines China, North Korea, Russia and Iran as foreign adversaries. The bill also requires that an app be considered controlled by a foreign adversary if it meets at least one of three different criteria: if it is based in one of these countries, if one of these countries owns a 20% stake in it, or if the app is under the “direction or control” of one of the foreign adversaries.
It’s easy to see how this legislation creates a template for taking future action against social media companies beyond just TikTok. In the wake of the 2016 election, Democratic lawmakers, mainstream media pundits, and national security advisers all accused Facebook of being complicit in Russia’s various plans to sow election-related discord online. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper She said Russia was more responsible for Hillary Clinton’s loss than Trump. The crux of this argument was that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had allowed his platform to be compromised by Russian disinformation.
It’s true that if the TikTok bill were to become law today, the federal government likely wouldn’t take direct action against Facebook or X tomorrow. But the language used in the bill – “direction and control” – is extremely slippery. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which vindictive bureaucrats accuse an underdog app of promoting contrary views and punish it accordingly.
“House ban on TikTok does not protect our nation,” he wrote Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) on X. “It is a disturbing gift of unprecedented authority to President Biden and the surveillance state that threatens the very core of American digital innovation and free expression.”