But TikTok was not banned… Nor was this about speech. It was about Chinese CCP ownership and control. If the CCP divests and sells it to an American company, TikTok will live on.
And if it's about CCP ownership and control, I guess we should probably institute a ban on relying on China for anything at all, including building all of the cell phones kids watch TikTok from.
Interesting how the narrative is that social media can only be a thing if it's controlled by an entity that the US government can effectively bully into violating our privacy domestically. This doesn't strike you as a plain old case of common xenophobia, does it? Citizens in the US will mock other countries for censoring the internet, but this doesn't strike me as all that different from that.
(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country;
The law doesn't ban TikTok. It was written carefully with the doj, and being passed by Congress holds real weight vs an executive order (as it should!)
The reaction to this, calling out "hypocrisy" or essentially insulting Congress does nothing to assuage the central question of whether TikTok is a national security threat. It's only going to make those with suspicions dig their heels in deeper.
China has said from the earliest ban attempts under Trump that they would not allow the divestment of Chinese interests. Legislators knew this - they knew that the divestment would never happen, and so in my eyes, they wrote ban into law with a thin veneer of distraction.