TikTok and the U.S. government are fighting

On May 6th around noon, I got a message from my supervisor saying “I don’t know if y’all heard but TikTok is suing the U.S. government.” At that point, I had not heard because I was too deep into analyzing the lyrics of the latest Kendrick diss track aimed at Drake, Not Like Us. So now I have 2 big beefs to pay attention to?! I kind of live for this drama. Let’s get straight into it.

If you didn’t know, in April of this year, President Biden signed into law a bill mandating the sale of TikTok to an American owner or the social platform would be banned from operating in the United States. Talks of a TikTok ban have been going on in Congress since 2022. It’s not because our lawmakers hate that Gen Z are doing dances online. I’m sure if any of them actually tried it, they would enjoy a little 1, 2 step on the TikTok app.

The U.S. government remains ten toes down on their assertion that because TikTok is Chinese-owned it represents a national security threat. This is the first red flag. The message that TikTok is unsafe because its owners are Chinese is rooted in blatant xenophobia. But even  more red flags have appeared in the recent months as Congress pushed forward with a TikTok ban harder than they have in years.

In November 2023,  just weeks into Israel's violence against Palestinians and witnessing the growth of the pro-Palestine movement especially among young people on TikTok, U.S. lawmakers started accusing the company of “brainwashing American youth.” The solution? Force the sale of TikTok to a U.S. based company. Aka, censorship.

This week, TikTok clapped back with a lawsuit claiming the new law is unconstitutional and violates TikTok users’ right to free speech.

Now I’m not here to be a TikTok stan. I like a little mindless scroll and trending sound as much as the next chronically online person. But what this situation shows us is that the government can actually move with a quickness if they wanted to regulate a tech company. This may come as a surprise to you given the lack of regulation or oversight for the U.S.-based social media companies.

A whole former president incited a violent insurrection at the Capitol organized mostly on Facebook and for some reason Facebook is still allowed to operate in the same ways that it has. Disinformation runs rampant on places like X (formerly Twitter) and yet, X is still kicking without accountability. YouTube users can get radicalized in a matter of hours by hate content fed to them by the site’s algorithm and then carry out violent acts offline, yet parent company Google gets no flack from lawmakers. This is all happening on homegrown, American, social media companies.

So what exactly does Congress want? My take is that they want control over what is said and seen on TikTok, but for the wrong reasons. But what if our government regulated ALL of Big Tech? We don’t need a TikTok ban. We need legislation focused on making sure all tech companies prioritize people’s data privacy over their profit and have systems in place that don’t favor hate content and disinformation. We need Congress to think bigger and direct that same energy over to Silicon Valley.

I’ll certainly be watching what happens with this lawsuit. In the meantime, if you want to direct your energy somewhere, check out this petition the Kairos Campaigns team has up telling Congress: get it together (my words, not theirs) and think bigger than TikTok.