Legislators have made exceedingly clear that the intent of the bill they're currently fast-tracking through Congress is "to finally ban TikTok in the United States," as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chair of the House Republican conference, proudly put it.
"TikTok must be banned," concurred Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), the Republican chief deputy whip.
"I applaud the strong bipartisan effort to ban TikTok," added Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
"No one is trying to disguise anything," clarified Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). "We want to ban TikTok."
Some of the bill's proponents, like Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), have been less forthcoming than their colleagues. Sherrill strangely repeats the common yet obviously specious claim that the bill "doesn't ban TikTok," which is just pure politician sleight-of-hand: No, the text does not specifically provide for an immediate, automatic, blanket ban of TikTok, but it does provide for a fatal ultimatum to effectuate the ban of TikTok within six months, requiring TikTok to comply with U.S. demands for divestiture from its parent company, ByteDance, or face federal prohibition. So while the legislation would not impose the ban right away, it does create the exact statutory mechanism by which TikTok is named and targeted for banning in the very near future.
Ultimately, the desired end-result is the same one that has been long sought by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the bill's leading sponsor: "To ban TikTok ... before it's too late." The forced divestiture is merely a mechanism to achieve this predetermined outcome.
Why now?
Drafters of the bill are said to have received "technical assistance" from the White House; President Biden swiftly pledged to sign it. Among the factors that are said to have spurred this latest outburst of legislative activity was a secret briefing last week by the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). "Because it was a classified hearing, I cannot discuss the details," explained Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which sprung into action after receiving the secret "Intelligence Community" presentation.
If the bill's supporters get what they want, millions of Americans would find their ability to access TikTok terminated by the government, just in time for the November 2024 election. This radical state intervention was endorsed last week by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a unanimous 50-0 vote, establishing a coveted bipartisan consensus in favor of expelling American users from their preferred social media platform. This extreme action is to be carried out, as usual, in the alleged name of "national security," and to more aggressively combat perceived "foreign adversaries."
The bill names TikTok as a "foreign adversary controlled application," with the "adversary" in question being China, but it also goes further and prohibits "applications" associated with the standard litany of official U.S. "adversaries"—Russia, North Korea, and Iran. More additions to the list are always possible, perhaps in the event that Cuba or Venezuela develop a short-form dance video app that becomes suspiciously popular with American teens.
Another provision authorizes the President, who is currently Joe Biden and may soon be Donald Trump, to make unilateral determinations about whether certain applications "present a significant threat to the national security of the United States," and therefore must be banned like TikTok. The criteria for making such a determination is left conspicuously vague.
So if you really want to give Biden or Trump more unilateral power to control the proliferation of content online, this appears to be just the bill for you.
If enacted, Americans who suddenly find their access to TikTok terminated by federal decree would include millions of adults—not just minors, by any stretch—for whom TikTok is a primary means of consuming news and information, as well as expressing their own public speech, and in some cases even earning a livelihood.
While China may not have a First Amendment right to operate commercial enterprises in the United States, American citizens are certainly afforded First Amendment protections against their speech being abridged by the government. Punitive state intervention to blockade Americans from a massively popular social media platform, which they had otherwise used voluntarily to consume the speech of others and express their own speech, would be a speech-abridging action by the federal government of a magnitude that has no obvious precedent.
If the case for banning TikTok advanced by the "Intelligence Community" is so airtight and worthy of instant unanimous approval, they should disclose the supporting evidence. Otherwise the public's only option is to credulously accept subjective, questionably-motivated claims of unknown "Intelligence Community" operators who purport to assess a "national security" threat posed by Communist-controlled teenage dance videos. Before rashly ejecting up to 170 million American users from a top social media platform, partly based on evidence furnished in these secret Star Chamber proceedings, why not "de-classify" and release the relevant evidentiary material so the public can evaluate it for themselves? Why should informed democratic deliberations on the subject be reserved for those with specially-approved Security Clearances?
In a March 2023 debate over an earlier iteration of the TikTok-banning bill, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said, "This isn't just about the company, this is about the rights of 150 million Americans." Allegations that TikTok functions as a "funnel to the Chinese government" were nothing more than "innuendo" and "conjecture," Paul charged. Likewise, a Justice Department memo supporting the TikTok bill last week vaguely alludes to "the potential for the PRC [China] to influence content on TikTok," but cites no concrete examples of this purported PRC manipulation ever happening.
The drive to ban TikTok has parallels to the European Union rushing to ban "RT" and other Russian-owned media outlets after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Thanks to the unique inheritances of the First Amendment, the U.S. could not be so easily compelled to take such blunt-force censorship action, however ardently American political and media elites might have shared the anti-Russian sentiments of their E.U. counterparts.
Those inheritances will surely be eroded if Congress plows ahead with its feverishly expedited TikTok ban.
Michael Tracey is an independent reporter with Substack. Find him at mtracey.net. Follow him on Twitter @mtracey.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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