The recent grilling of TikTok’s CEO in front of an almost entirely hostile congressional committee was a reminder that a hardening stance against China is one of the few areas of genuine bipartisanship. That and an antagonistic stance toward Big Tech, so TikTok actually manages to check two boxes.
In general, it’s a positive when parties and officials across the political spectrum find common ground and work together to solve collective problems. In the case of TikTok specifically, however, the rising chorus to ban the app and prevent or dramatically curtail access for American citizens is a profound mistake — not because TikTok per se matters greatly one way or the other but because banning it violates the core strength of American society: its openness.
The animosity of Washington toward TikTok has been building for years. In 2020, as the popularity of the app soared in the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration threatened a ban, and coerced the Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, to agree that all U.S. data would be housed and controlled by Oracle, an American server company. Yet, even as TikTok merged its U.S. data to Oracle servers in 2022, the drumbeat grew that the company was a national security threat that answers to the Chinese Communist Party. The Biden administration has no ..
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