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The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
I generally agree with the 2nd paragraph. The 1st one, though, I think there is enough national security justification to ban private companies from publishing apps that send data about the nation's citizens to a different nation's government to at least investigate it. I don't know enough about the inner workings of TikTok to have an opinion on if a TikTok ban would be justified under such reasoning.
Circling back to the 2nd paragraph, I agree that this isn't the role of the government, even if TikTok were rotting our children's brains with its addicting content and such. It's ultimately the responsibility of the individual or of their adult guardians not to fall for the app's siren's song, and the government has no business censoring it. At best, I could see an argument for age restrictions like for tobacco or alcohol (or, as is the case in more and more states, marijuana), if there is enough scientific evidence for the harms it can do to developing brains.
Now, I'm not sure how much scientific evidence would be enough to convince me, though. I would like it if more resources were devoted into researching this, given that there are at least signs that it's harmful. And to combine the 2 issues, I've heard that China itself censors certain content for children on its own local TikTok which are allowed in international TikTok, like certain vapid/borderline obscene content. Presumably the idea is to help to prevent rotting their kids' brains while letting kids of other countries rot theirs, hopefully to help China gain advantage in various international contexts as the children grow up to be adults running the next generation. I'm skeptical of the strength of this, and even if it were true, the liberal in me says that if letting American kids watch TikTok means America falls behind China on the international stage, then so be it, at least we didn't encroach upon our citizens' freedom on the way, but it does seem a serious enough thing to consider that I'd like to see much more research into it.
The thing that bugs me most about proposed Tiktok bans is that nobody seems to even have asked China to give us the benign version that encourages kids to watch science videos or whatever they have domestically. How can we complain about them poisoning the rest of the world when we don't even ask for the poison-free version?
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