Banning TikTok would do nothing to hinder Americans' ability to say (almost) whatever they want without fear of government retribution. Anything you would have said on TikTok can still be said on Facebook for example, or your own website.
No it isn't. China has already admitted they hacked us all the major US telecoms to spy on American citizens, and shown no indication that they intend to stop doing that sort of thing. We simply can't trust them to install applications on devices that store the most sensitive secrets of our politicians, military leaders, and citizens.
See Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon for more information. China admitted that Salt Typhoon was them, and Volt Typhoon is relatively obvious. It's worth also noting that they used the backdoors that were put in place for CISA requests, which is a perfect example of why government mandated backdoors are a bad idea.
But Americans do not want to be spied upon by a literal adversarial government which sets up police stations in other countries.
I don't want to be spied upon by my country, but currently Republicans want to use the force of the federal government to police and punish wrongthink, and Obama was a true believer in the US spy state, so they didn't exactly try to remove it.
It's hard to get America to undo a policy that was sold as "Kill the terrorists in our country" when those same voters have, 20 years later, enthusiastically supported another round of "kill the brown and muslims because they are terrorists" and want to deport people for tweets.
That feels like a facetious question. You may as well also ask, "Why we bother arresting the worst murderers when there will still be other murderers?"
It’s about ownership, not speech. If Bytedance refuses to change TikTok’s ownership, it gets banned for that reason. (Same way a foreign radio station would get banned for violating our ownership rules.)
The law (not bill) requires an interagency process for identifying further targets. It starts with TikTok. It does so because of TikTok’s ownership. Not speech. I say this as someone who worked on and whipped for the bill.
> You're allowed whatever speech you want, so long as we have influence over the speakers and microphones that you use to do so.
That's going to have a chilling effect on what actually gets said.
I was using "using USD" as a stand-in for "using platforms run by people we can reliably bully into tampering with your speech if it becomes problematic," and also to suggest a bit of corruption on the side, which seems likely given that Zuckerberg and Trump are now buddies.
When it comes to limiting the audience we can engage with, that would require a ban on talking to specific people rather than on a specific platform. Anyone that I may have engaged with on TikTok can still be engaged with on other platforms.
The fact that many of the biggest social media platforms are based in the US and that we saw clear evidence of both the US government's and the plstforms' willingness to collude is a huge problem. To me that's a separate issue than the TikTok ban, though they are in the same arena I suppose.
So that's one quite mainstream opinion that would be suppressed if the government banned TikTok. No, you wouldn't be arrested for posting pro-Palestine stuff to Facebook (at least not under Biden...) but that's not the only way for the government to curtail speech.
Another thing we know is that the White House under Biden was pressuring FB and others to downrank anti-covid-vaccine content until a judge ordered them to stop.
Kind of quaint in 2025.
Not necessarily. It depends why they were primarily successful on TikTok, which we don't know. If it's because American platforms tend not to highly rank content that goes against the US's geopolitical ideology, then no, I wouldn't expect that.
Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655603
Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...
Facebook has severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience during the Israel-Gaza war, according to BBC research - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
To be a first amendment violation this would technically have to involve the US government working to censor American's speech over Palestine. Functionally, though, this is a government censoring specific speech and feels very much like a free speech issue.
Imagine if they shut down CNN and MSNBC for being the most anti-Trump major TV stations. Wouldn’t you think that was an infringement, even if it wouldn’t stop individuals from speaking their mind on the topic?
Banning a specific platform would only be making that difficult if there weren't other options. TikToj is one of many social media platforms, and given that industry's tendency to steal each others features and engagement models it isn't even particularly unique in what it offers.
All that said, I'm not a fan of almost any government involvement and would much rather them stay in their lane. I just see this one as an overreach problem rather that a violation of free speech.
Do you also think it's impossible to convict anyone for murder because it was the bullet killing the victim, not the person holding the gun?
Half of America's exports is media to foreign countries, you're opening a can of worms.
The whole point is that a citizen can say whatever they want without the government stopping them, it has nothing to do with how many people can hear it or where it can be said.