Late last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill with overwhelming bipartisan support requiring TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell off the app or face a ban in the United States. The concerns are ostensibly about security, but the potential ban is also about a lot more than the app itself.
TikTok
Something strange is happening in liberal democracies’ relationship with social media platforms—specifically with TikTok, which is being banned or threatened with bans in democracies around the world. It is commonplace for authoritarian regimes to ban such platforms, but this is relatively new and dangerous territory for democracies.