Banning TikTok Isn’t That Easy

“In the summer of 2020, in full re-election mode and looking for new ways to punish China, President Donald Trump threatened to cut off TikTok from the phones of millions of Americans unless its parent company agreed to sell all of its U.S. operations to American owners. The effort collapsed,” the New York Times reports.

“Now, more than two years later, after lengthy studies of how Chinese authorities could use the app for everything from surveillance to information operations, the Biden administration is attempting a strikingly similar move. It is better organized, vetted by lawyers, and coordinated with new bills in Congress that appear to have considerable bipartisan support.”

“Yet making TikTok safe from Chinese exploitation — as a tool for Chinese officials to surveil Americans’ tastes and whereabouts, as an entry point into the phones that contain their whole lives and as a way to pump out disinformation — turns out to be harder than it looks.”

New Republic: Fear the wrath of the TikTok voter.