TikTok has been vital to almost every young person’s life since 2018. You can say whatever you want about the platform TikTok has, but you can’t deny that it changed the world one step at a time. The Senate passed a bill on Tuesday that would restrict TikTok, a historic development in government regulation of social media. TikTok is a place where people of different backgrounds can express themselves and taking that away is like taking away our First Amendment right of free expression and speech. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden signed a bill Wednesday that could lead to a ban on TikTok, but the app won’t be cut off from its millions of American users just yet.
The debate over TikTok’s future is about not only free expression online and the future of social media, but also how Americans think about data security and who’s deciding what they see online. TikTok plans to take the Biden administration to court over the law. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said he is confident TikTok would win in court, adding that users should not expect issues with the app in the meantime. “Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere,” Chew said in a video posted on TikTok. The law has a built-in delay of nine months, and China can sell the app to the U.S. rather than facing a national prohibition. If the app is sold every video we watch will be evaluated from now on and huge restrictions will be in place. People all around the U.S. are protesting for the right to have TikTok and not have it taken away or sold off somewhere where everything you do on it will be controlled.
The president also has the authority to issue a 90-day extension for ByteDance, a parent company, to sell TikTok, which would push the deadline to April of next year. Even with the extension, some critics of the bill have said it is not a long enough timeline for a sale of this size. This isn’t a huge solution, but it’s a start to not getting rid of TikTok.
