A social media app from China is said to seduce our teenagers in ways that American platforms can only dream of. Gen Z has already wasted half a young lifetime on videos of pranks, makeup tutorials, and babies dubbed to talk like old men. Now computer sorcerers employed by a hostile government allegedly have worse in store. Prohibit this "digital fentanyl," the argument goes, or the Republic may be lost.
And so President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act of 2024, which requires the China-based company ByteDance to either spin-off TikTok or watch it be banned. Separating the company from the app would supposedly solve the other problem frequently blamed on TikTok: the circle linking U.S. users' personal data to the Chinese Communist Party. The loop has already been cut, TikTok argues, because American users' data are now stored with Oracle in Texas. That's about as believable as those TikTok baby talk vignettes, retorts Congress.
