US House Passes Tiktok "Ban"

Nothing builds bipartisanship like a common enemy.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Today the US House passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The Act would require Bytedance - the parent company of Tiktok, to sell Tiktok within 5.5 months to an American-controlled Company or conglomerate or face expulsion from all US app stores & devices. So off the bat - it’s not really a “ban,” more of a forced countdown to a sale.

Already, creators on Tiktok are upset. Many claim that this ban would infringe on their 1st Amendment rights of Freedom of Expression & Freedom to Assemble. Others pointed out the rushed legislative process - it was only 8 days from the Act’s introduction that it was passed and without meaningful hearings or public comment - as a sign of corruption. Still others pointed out that members of Congress who voted for the bill have been actively trading Meta stock (a competitor that would benefit from a Tiktok ban). 

A national security threat?

The justification for the Act is that forcing Bytedance to divest Tiktok is necessary to protect the 170 million Americans on the app from being fed intentionally manipulated information or biased videos at the direction of the Chinese government. As it stands now, there’s virtually no way to know whether Tiktok’s algorithm is being “truthful” by showing us the most engaged content on the platform or if Bytedance headquarters is pushing its own hand-picked videos at the expense of the American public. I’m talking about misinformation, divisive takes, or even brain-dead content like chocolate-covered strawberries (recently an innocuous video of the fruit has garnered hundreds of millions of views, and no one really knows why). 

Meanwhile, the Chinese version of Tiktok - Douyin - has offered users a “STEM”-specific page for users to learn about science, mathematics, and engineering anytime they want. This feature has been on Douyin for years and is slowly making its way into Tiktok, but it’s an excellent example of the national security risk that a foreign-owned media conglomerate can create here at home: China can pull a lever to make their citizens smarter while concurrently dumbing us down, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

I’ve suspected for a long time that the platform has been used nefariously by China to infect the American dialogue. Manipulating what videos are shown to Americans is just one way they can do it. So is hiring an army of bot commenters - always hiding behind username masks - to stir up conflict and spread misinformation in comment sections. When it comes to supporting a forced sale of Tiktok from Bytedance, I’m in full support. Why should we take the unnecessary risk of letting a foreign government manipulate our conversation and flow of information? We gain little from the status quo and stand to lose a lot. 

At the same time, the concerns on misinformation campaigns & content manipulation apply equally to American-held platforms like Meta and X. This bill would be a lot stronger if it took action to broadly rein in social media and subject all platforms, regardless of ownership, to rules on content manipulation. As it stands now, it only solves part of the problem by attacking China’s ownership of Tiktok.

What now?

It’s unclear whether the Act will be signed into law. The Senate has been quiet about its intentions to take up the ban, and though Biden has previously said he would sign a forced divestment bill he hasn’t yet commented on this bill’s passage. For now, Tiktok is here to stay. But momentum to force divestment has only grown stronger over time. I think it’s safe to assume that Bytedance will have to sell Tiktok in the near future. To whom and for how much remain open questions.

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Thanks for reading! If you have thoughts on the potential ban of Tiktok I’d love to hear them. Just respond to this email anytime. And don’t forget to register to vote!