Was There Nothing More Important for the Government To Do Than Ban TikTok?

There are so many things that the U.S. Senate could do if they moved quickly on any matter. That was proven by the fact that they hurried up to pass a bill forcing TikTok’s parent company to sell or the app would be banned in the United States. Great work …

The bill would force ByteDance to sell TikTok within nine months. When it passed, President Joe Biden said that he would sign it, and now he has. The push to try to get ByteDance to pay boils down to the fact that it is a Chinese company, and that is pretty much it.

The Associated Press obtained quotes from those who voted on the bill. “Congress is not acting to punish ByteDance, TikTok or any other individual company,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairwoman Maria Cantwell said. “Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, harming vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our U.S. government personnel.”

The idea behind the bill was that many thought that the Chinese government could easily get the information of Americans through the app. I guess they thought our dancing videos were a hot commodity. “Banning TikTok would be an extraordinary step that requires extraordinary justification,” said Becca Branum, a deputy director at the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology, which advocates for digital rights. “Extending the divestiture deadline neither justifies the urgency of the threat to the public nor addresses the legislation’s fundamental constitutional flaws.”

Senators voted for the bill but then talked about how banning the app or forcing ByteDance to sell could eventually lead to hurting First Amendment Rights—which is the concern that many TikTok users had over the bill. “At the stage that the bill is signed, we will move to the courts for a legal challenge,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, reported said in a memo to employees, obtained by The Associated Press. “This is the beginning, not the end of this long process,” Beckerman wrote.

There were not more important things to do?

Remember when they could not codify Roe v. Wade and millions of women lost their rights to an abortion? Or what about all of the attacks on transgender rights around the country? Those are not important to tackle but banning TikTok is the right move? It truly shows, us as Americans, what can be done when the government actually cares about something.

What this all shows is that the government wants control. They want to be able to seem like they are “protecting” Americans when they actually just don’t want an app that Americans love to be sourced from a country outside of our own. That’s what this all boils down to, to me, and it is absolutely ridiculous.

Biden has signed the bill, and ByteDance can sell the app to keep TikTok in America if they want or fight it in court, but for now, it is one of those things where we really are just looking at our own government and laughing at what they deem a priority and what is actually going on in this country.

(featured image: illustration by Chesnot/Getty Images)