President Joe Biden signed a law earlier this year that will effectively ban TikTok in the United States, and many conservatives applauded. They should have known better.
Unless the courts stop it from taking effect, the law will produce an unprecedented infringement of people's right to free speech , and there’s every reason to believe it will eventually be used to suppress conservatives’ speech in particular.
Shouldn’t that be obvious?
This same president and others in the federal government have been making suppressing dissenters’ speech on social media a top priority for years.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has just admitted that the FBI successfully pressured his company to censor information about the Biden family on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 election. He has also admitted that the Biden administration successfully pressured Meta to censor disapproved content about COVID-19.
The “Twitter Files” released after Elon Musk bought that platform revealed similar widespread censorship at the federal government’s behest.
And, under the feds’ influence, these platforms even banned former President Donald Trump for years.
Yet now conservatives somehow think Biden is looking out for Americans’ best interests in banning a social media platform entirely.
This is different, some would say, because of TikTok’s connection to China. But that argument has several problems.
For one, it’s not clear that China exerts significant influence over the platform. TikTok is owned by private investors, but because its parent company is based in China, the Chinese government could, in theory, make demands on the company related to user data or the content the platform promotes. But the U.S. government hasn’t presented any evidence that this has actually happened to any significant extent or that it’s about to happen.
Anyway, most of the videos Americans watch on TikTok are created by their fellow Americans, and very few, if any, have anything to do with the Chinese government, directly or indirectly.
And so what if China were to boost some videos over others? The First Amendment assumes that people can handle “bad” speech, including propaganda from foreign governments. If conservatives really believe in free speech, they should understand that the remedy for “bad” speech is more speech, not government suppression.
Have conservatives already forgotten that the Left tries to justify censoring conservatives based on allegations that they’re acting under the influence of a foreign adversary, Russia?
Which brings us to another problem: Today it’s TikTok, but tomorrow it could be X or another platform where dissenters from the Democratic line of the day are allowed to speak freely.
The law that Biden signed doesn’t just ban TikTok. It also allows the president to ban other social media platforms if he, or she, decides they’re “subject to the control of” a foreign adversary and a threat to national security.
You don’t have to look far to find people on the Left accusing Musk of secretly doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding on X. Or to find people on the Left cheering Brazil’s shutdown of X.
Can’t conservatives see where this is heading?
Fortunately for them, my public-interest law firm, the Liberty Justice Center, sees it. That’s why we’ve filed a First Amendment lawsuit challenging the TikTok ban. We represent BASED Politics, a nonprofit organization that uses TikTok to share ideas about free markets and individual liberty, hardly favorites of the Chinese Communist Party, with a Generation Z audience that it can’t reach anywhere else.
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear arguments in the case on Monday.
We should win because the ban violates Americans’ First Amendment rights on a massive scale that the government can’t begin to justify. We intend to get a decision that will protect conservatives’ speech online now and in the future, whether they like it or not.
Jacob Huebert is president of the Liberty Justice Center, the public-interest law firm representing BASED Politics in its lawsuit against the federal government.
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