Look, if Congress suddenly discovered a spine about surveillance because teens are doing dances on an app owned by a Chinese parent company, that’s cute. Very cinematic. But let’s not pretend TikTok is the only corporation inhaling Americans’ data like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. Meta, Google, X, data brokers, shady ad-tech goblins nobody has heard of—our privacy regime is already a flaming yard sale. So if the policy answer is “ban one app because foreign ownership is scary,” congratulations: you’ve solved one square inch of a football field while calling it national security. If lawmakers are serious, pass a real federal data privacy law, restrict data transfers, regulate recommendation algorithms, and stop acting like slapping TikTok is the same thing as building policy.
And yes, China is a legitimate concern. Nobody serious denies that ByteDance’s ties to Beijing raise real questions, especially under China’s national security laws. But the U.S. government doesn’t get to wave the words “national security” like a magic wand and vaporize a major communications platform used by roughly 170 million Americans without clearing some extremely high constitutional hurdles. This isn’t just an app where people rank smoothies; it’s a massive venue for speech, journalism, organizing, art, and small business. Forcing a sale may be more defensible than an outright ban, but even then the government should have to prove the threat, explain the remedy, and survive actual judicial scrutiny rather than operating on vibes and cable-news panic.
There’s also a delicious hypocrisy in Washington suddenly discovering concern about foreign influence while domestic platforms spend years supercharging disinformation, election lies, harassment, and addictive design features with the enthusiasm of a casino pumping oxygen. If the principle is that platforms with dangerous algorithmic power need oversight, great—apply it across the board. But if the principle is “this one is foreign, therefore emergency,” then we’re not writing coherent tech policy; we’re doing geopolitics by press release. Liberal answer: don’t hand the state a censorship-shaped weapon it will absolutely be tempted to reuse. Regulate data. Demand transparency. Protect speech. And maybe, just maybe, don’t confuse performative anti-China theater with competent governance.
Let’s stop pretending this is a quirky free-speech dispute about whether Americans can watch cooking hacks in peace. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company subject to the influence and legal demands of the Chinese Communist Party—a regime not exactly famous for respecting privacy, dissent, or the quaint notion that companies can tell the state to get lost. If a hostile foreign adversary can potentially access data on millions of Americans, shape what content they see, suppress topics it dislikes, and fine-tune influence operations through one of the most powerful media platforms in the country, that is not “xenophobia”; that is a giant blinking red national-security siren. We do not let strategic rivals buy critical infrastructure and then act shocked when people worry about sabotage. Information infrastructure counts too, even if it comes with lip-sync videos.
And spare everyone the lazy whataboutism that “American companies collect data too.” Yes, and conservatives have plenty of criticisms of Big Tech’s surveillance model, censorship instincts, and monopoly behavior. But there is a meaningful difference between a domestic company that can be hauled into U.S. courts, investigated by Congress, and constrained by American law, and a company tied to an authoritarian state that can compel cooperation behind closed doors. That distinction is not subtle. It’s the whole point. A force-sale approach is actually the market-friendly compromise here: nobody is banning short videos, nobody is outlawing creators, and nobody is smashing phones in the town square. The policy says the platform can continue operating—just not under ownership linked to a geopolitical adversary.
This is also one of those rare cases where Washington’s bipartisan alarm is not just performative caffeine jitters. The concern has spanned the Trump administration, the Biden administration, the House vote pushing divestiture, and years of warnings from national-security officials. Courts should absolutely scrutinize the law, but government is not required to wait until a foreign-controlled platform leaves fingerprints on a crisis before acting. Conservatives are usually skeptical when the state claims emergency powers, true—but national defense is one of the few things the federal government is actually supposed to do. If the choice is between mildly inconveniencing an app’s ownership structure and leaving a CCP-adjacent influence machine embedded in American life because people are emotionally attached to their For You Page, this is not exactly Sophie’s Choice. Force the sale.