What do we do with TikTok? the political class in the United States asks, not without anguish.
What has happened in recent days shows that the answer is not simple.
First, it must be said that last week the House of Representatives (our Deputies) approved a bill to force the Chinese company ByteDance, owner of TikTok, to divest (sell the company to North American capital) or expose itself to a sanction.
The episode offers particularities.
The first is that in times of fierce rift between Republicans and Democrats,
the anti-TikTok law generated an unprecedented consensus for the time
, and legislators from both parties voted in favor.
Neither Russia, nor Putin, nor the invasion of Ukraine today equal the idea of
an “enemy of the United States”
that TikTok/China does generate.
The other peculiarity appears as a paradox typical of the present.
While Congress promotes the sanction, and Biden assured that he will enact the law if it is approved, on February 12 and in view of the next elections,
the President opened his account (@bidenhq) on that social network
.
Perfect synthesis of the contradictions that new platforms generate in traditional politicians.
Close enemies, they don't really know how to handle them, but they do need them.
The one who surprised with a defense of the Chinese social network was Donald Trump, who during his presidency had promoted sanctions.
Inexplicably, or not so much, he changed his mind.
“There is a lot of good and a lot of bad with TikTok,”
the former president said.
“But what I don't like is that without TikTok Facebook can get bigger, and Facebook is an enemy of the people, along with many media outlets.”
Facebook, from the Meta company whose owner is Mark Zuckerberg, deleted Trump from its platform after the attempted takeover of the Capitol, and together with the traditional media (the big newspapers and CNN) they
are tenacious and vocal opponents of Trump's re-election. republican.
This being the case, the TikTok problem seems difficult to resolve for two reasons.
First, because the sanction would not have the same consensus in the Senate.
But much more so because
a possible ban would clash with the right to freedom of expression
(not of the Chinese owners, who do not have that right in the US, but of the more than 150 million American users who receive and publish there its content) guaranteed in the first amendment of the North American Constitution.
Any sanction, then, will surely be revoked by the Supreme Court of Justice.
It is at this point where the issue becomes truly relevant because
two structural ideas of the United States collide
: national security and the right to freedom of expression, sacred like in no other country.
If TikTok were finally banned (the Chinese do not plan to sell it)
we would witness the end of one of the core ideas of the most powerful country
, and which radiated to much of the world: that of the free circulation of information and ideas, even those that They come from outside.
Much more is at stake than the ability to watch funny, and often silly, short videos.