Freeing TikTok: Ending Chinese control of the social media platform would enhance free speech

Freeing TikTok: Ending Chinese control of the social media platform would enhance free speech


It didn’t take Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book The Anxious Generation to alert us to social media’s pernicious effects on children and teenagers. And it turns out that TikTok, a digital application owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, goes viral in the minds of young people significantly more than Instagram, Facebook, X, and Snapchat — and thus allows our enemies to roil our political culture and otherwise engage in psychological warfare. To give one prominent example, TikTok drove an epidemic of apologias for Osama bin Laden’s manifesto earlier this year.

To its rare credit, Congress has decided to do something about this problem. As part of its recently passed national security and military aid bill, both houses voted by huge majorities to force the Chinese Communist

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