The RESTRICT Act is an incipient First Amendment disaster.
Few are more hostile to the ubiquitous social-media app TikTok than I am. Put bluntly: It should be banned outright. Not just banned from government devices, but banned from the United States altogether, along with all such other attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to both data-mine and propagandistically influence an entire generation of Americans via targeted-message exposure. (The fact that the CCP is hoarding reams of potential blackmail material from Gen Z’s hugely public and awkward adolescence is an almost secondary consideration.) This is an easy call, a matter of fundamental national security.
But truthfully, I don’t just hate TikTok because of the fact that it’s a transparent Chinese op. I hate it because it is an ungated cloaca of demotic sludge, spewing forth brain-warping (and yet clearly addictive; the user numbers don’t lie) infinite content and lulling its participants into the belief that this — highly mediated, because algorithmic — world is the real world. TikTok is the place where people fake cases of Tourette’s Syndrome for clicks, then the followers develop “cases” themselves. It is where you go to “doomscroll the Libs,” easily pulling up one insane 20-year-old activist after another to confirm all your priors. It is a narcotic, and a toxic one at that. (So says the inveterate Twitter user.)
It is with all that in mind that I rise vehemently in opposition to the RESTRICT Act, which is currently the subject of hot debate in the House and the Senate, and exhort all lawmakers of all parties to oppose it. (I am a realist, alas, so I fear these words will fall on deaf ears on the Left.) The RESTRICT Act is being sold by the Biden administration as an “anti-TikTok” bill — and to be sure, it would do the job — but the powers it seeks to grant to the Federal government are vastly more sweeping and potentially sinister than that. I will quote only Section 3 of the law to give you a sense of how broad its ambit would truly be:
(a) In General. — The Secretary, in consultation with the relevant executive department and agency heads, is authorized to and shall take action to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate, including by negotiating, entering into, or imposing, and enforcing any mitigation measure to address any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States that the Secretary determines—
(1) poses an undue or unacceptable risk of—
(A) sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology products and services in the United States;
(B) catastrophic effects on the security or resilience of the critical infrastructure or digital economy of the United States;
(C) interfering in, or altering the result or reported result of a Federal election, as determined in coordination with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Treasury, and the Federal Election Commission; or
(D) coercive or criminal activities by a foreign adversary that are designed to undermine democratic processes and institutions or steer policy and regulatory decisions in favor of the strategic objectives of a foreign adversary to the detriment of the national security of the United States, as determined in coordination with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Treasury, and the Federal Election Commission; or
(2) otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons. [Emphasis added.]
“Any,” “otherwise,” “undermine,” “as determined” . . . these are weasel-words set to become statutory disasters (the various definitions and enumerations specified in the bill do little to substantively narrow its scope). I am not particularly attuned to the paranoid style of politics, but it strikes me that signing off on legislation such as this, so potentially and immediately abusable by the state, is like setting the welcome mat out for Count Dracula along with a fresh pint of blood and an invitation to come on in and sit a spell.
There is an easy way for Congress to ban TikTok: Ban TikTok. Throwing the net this wide is an incipient First Amendment disaster.