Freeing TikTok: Ending Chinese Control of the Social Media Platform Would Enhance Free Speech

It didn’t take Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book The Anxious Generation to alert us to social media’s pernicious effects on children and teenagers. And it turns out that TikTok, a digital application owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, goes viral in the minds of young people significantly more than Instagram, Facebook, X, and Snapchat — and thus allows our enemies to roil our political culture and otherwise engage in psychological warfare. To give one prominent example, TikTok drove an epidemic of apologias for Osama bin Laden’s manifesto earlier this year.

To its rare credit, Congress has decided to do something about this problem. As part of its recently passed national security and military aid bill, both houses voted by huge majorities to force the Chinese Communist Party to divest itself of its mind-control tool. President Joe Biden signed the measure into law. An earlier version of the bill was proposed by recently resigned Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), unanimously approved by the House select committee on China that he chaired, and then also overwhelmingly passed the House. The legislation would force certain social media companies owned by America’s foes, notably China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, to find new ownership or lose app store availability within 180 days.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the Washington Examiner

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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

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