Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

The House of Representatives voted today to ban TikTok in the US— unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells it to a company not based in China. After advancing on an unusually unanimous vote in committee the bill won wide bipartisan support from the full House. It was approved 352-65. To become law the bill needs approval by the Senate and then a signature from President Biden— who said today he will sign it.

I'm not sure how I feel about this "ban" on TikTok. (I quote "ban" because it does provide the alternative for ByteDance to sell it to a company not based in China... but that's essentially still a ban IMO.) As much as it's popular in some corners of the Internet to sneer at TikTok, the app does have 170 million users in the US. That's literally half the country. And it's actually more than 50% of the addressable market as the population figure of 340 million counts people of all ages. As much as the service is maligned for being popular with kids, including kids who arguably are too young to participate in social media, you've got to figure there really aren't that many kids under, say, age 6 on the app.

I'm not sure how I feel about this bill because I see arguments both pro and con. That said, I think there are way more cons than pros on this legislation.

The first con against the bill is that 170 million figure. It's frankly hard to believe that Congress would vote so overwhelming against something that's clearly so popular in the US.

The second con is the sense that there's a cultural, generational, and possibly even ethnic divide here. TikTok's most active users skew young. Congress skews old. This smacks very much of a "Darn kids these days!" argument from the dinosaurs stumbling around the edge of the tar pit in Congress. And it seems very much a reactionary, anti-modern culture thing that would come from Republicans... especially as TikTok's biggest users are also less white in addition to being less old than the general population. Yet Democrats also widely supported the bill— 50 Dems and 15 Republicans voted against it— and President Biden said he'll sign it. Also, Trump was for it until he was against it. Though his argument now is that a ban will benefit Facebook, which he's labeled an Enemy of the People... even more so than the free press, apparently.

The one argument on the pro side is that because ByteDance is a Chinese company the Chinese government can compel them to give it any of the very rich data it collects on its users and their browsing habits. That argument does kind of smack of Sinophobia— another con— except that it's literally true. And except that the degree of data they can collect is literally the same as every other social media platform can collect. (The EFF, for example, says Congress should ban every company from doing that much data collection, not just one company in China.) So even this one pro argument is a very weak one.

Finally there's the con argument that this law is unlikely to survive court challenge. A US court struck down a similar state law in Montana late last year. That case is still being appealed, but the ban seems unlikely to win given the higher courts have never let stand a sweeping ban on digital communications.