Listen to Donald Trump, not SC AG Alan Wilson. There’s no need to ban TikTok now | Opinion
Whether you think TikTok is a national security threat that could turn our teenagers into Chinese government blackmail subjects or even spies when they grow up or just an addictive app where culture, comedy and commerce collide in short videos may depend on how often you use it.
Either way, you may not be able to thumb through it at all in a matter of days.
That possibility is a big deal for TikTok’s 170 million American users — and for the other half of the U.S. population, most of whom relinquish some privacy to access other social media sites.
Me, I’ll try them all. TikTok is on my phone, but its magical algorithm has more on my wife (who uses it to buy everything from salad spinners and sweaters to belts for tucking in your sweaters) and my teenage daughters (who use it with friends for lip-synching, dancing and shenanigans.)
The issue with TikTok, of course, is that its parent company can potentially be influenced by the Chinese government. How much and what kind of control isn’t clear and doesn’t matter to the U.S. politicians who, after years of complaining about it, found a way to change it. Or to try to.
Congress passed legislation that gave the Beijing-based company ByteDance — a company subject to Chinese laws and, the fear is, covert manipulation and surveillance — 270 days to sell TikTok or to shut down, and President Joe Biden signed it into law in April. The deadline is Jan. 19, Biden’s last full day in office. President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn into office Jan. 20.
With those deadlines looming, the U.S. Supreme Court held an expedited hearing Friday to determine whether it would intervene. The oral arguments from lawyers on either side lasted two and a half hours even as TikTokers weighed in on the app with analysis, jokes and prayers.
Two weeks before the hearing, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson joined 21 other state attorneys general to file a brief in the case, laying out arguments for why TikTok is a threat to national security and consumer privacy and why the law is “fully consistent” with free speech.
“Were it otherwise,” the attorneys general wrote, “Congress would be powerless to ban a cancer-causing radio merely because that radio also transmitted protected speech, or to ban sportsbetting apps merely because those apps also shared informative videos teaching their users the intricacies of sports gambling.”
Yet the case isn’t as cut-and-dried as they contend.
Don’t take my word for it. Take Trump’s. His intended solicitor general, John Sauer, filed a brief with the court, arguing for a delay. The brief has all the bravado and bluster of a Trump Truth Social post, full of exaggerations and superlatives, but it’s also full of something else: Reason.
First, shutting down one of the nation’s most popular platforms the day before a U.S. president who uses it so effectively takes office makes no sense. Second, there’s no clear and present danger that would justify shutting the site down right now. Third, the deadline is arbitrary. Fourth, Trump, who wrote “The Art of The Deal,” should get the chance to demonstrate it in action.
Supreme Court justices should issue an administrative stay, delaying the law’s effective date.
Sauer’s brief lays out that, “President Trump opposes banning TikTok in the United States at this juncture, and seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office.” It adds, less humbly, “Furthermore, President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government — concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged.”
As was pointed out during the court hearing on Friday, you’d have to be a Luddite who lives under a rock to not know about China’s ties to TikTok. But it’s safe to say most users don’t care. And it seems that the First Amendment should trump generic national security concerns here.
The U.S. government didn’t ban Pravda, the Russian propaganda tool, from being sold in the country in the 1950s. And the nation has never before restricted speech just because it might change hearts and minds. The way to combat speech you don’t agree with is counterspeech.
Of course, it’s rare that national security and free speech protections are pitted so squarely against one another as in the case of TikTok Inc. et al. v. Merrick Garland, attorney general. But there are ways to acknowledge risk without shutting TikTok down. A warning label would suffice.
My 18-year-old daughter isn’t too distraught. In a long text, I asked her, “Are you worried about Chinese control of TikTok? About how your private information may be used? About potential threats to national security?” She wrote back, “No lol I’m not.” There’s always Reels, she said.
My wife was more loquacious.
“I’ve been on TikTok since 2019 and have never had any issues,” she texted me. “There are bigger threats to national security than this app, which I love because it informs and connects me with a variety of communities. Like any social media app, there are issues but none of them (for me at least) are related to Chinese control or security.”
She added that she’s not too worried about geopolitics when this generation of kids grows up.
“Every kid on TikTok is suspicious of everything,” she said. “They’d actually be good at weeding out what’s real versus fake.”
What do you think about the potential TikTok ban? Email me at mhall@thestate.com and let me know. I, for one, hope first the Supreme Court and then our new president do not restrict speech.