Congress is considering giving President Biden unilateral power to decide which apps everyday Americans can have on their phones. In the name of banning TikTok, the DATA Act (HR 1153), would give any president broad and unquestioned authority to ban apps to reward their supporters and punish adversaries, which is exactly what is happening.
The act is a huge blow to the freedoms that Americans have enjoyed since the first smartphones came on the market.
Since then, social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, as well as internet search engines have become the main gateway for most Americans to get the news, political commentary, and entertainment. Each of these platforms gathers and stores enormous amounts of personal information about their users. Most Americans know this and accept it as part of modern life.
This drive to ban TikTok is a classic example of businesses pushing legislation that harms a competitor. And more than any other, Facebook and their parent company META has hypocritically pushed this false narrative. While demonizing and funding campaigns hitting rival TikTok, META is growing into a hardware company. And to make that shift, the company is relying on, you guessed it, China.
TIKTOK CEO TO PLEDGE COMPANY WILL GUARD DATA FROM CHINESE ACCESS, IN BID TO STAVE OFF BAN
According to a recent report, "Meta has a growing problem: The social media service wants to transform itself into a powerhouse in hardware, and it makes virtually all of it in China."
META has responded to these accusations by saying manufacturing hardware is "complicated" and can only be done in China.
This is all while META, their investors, and paid political spin-doctors have "played up nationalist concerns about threats from Chinese-owned rival TikTok."
But it’s not just TikTok who have been on the receiving end of these transparently hollow and hypocritical attacks from team META.
BIDEN ADMIN THREATENS BAN IF TIKTOK'S CHINESE OWNERS DON'T SELL STAKES
Facebook pushed Senators to step up the pressure on Google in 2018 hearings, and a former official once took to Twitter to call a Google executive a liar the year before over work in China.
Sound familiar?
This is all while META is relying on expansion in China for their growth into hardware.
The DATA Act is so broadly drafted that a plausible argument can be made that not only TikTok, but all of these social media and digital platforms are "otherwise subject to the influence of China" because they do business in and with China.
The bill would give President Biden and any president who follows, overly broad authority to arbitrarily target undeserving companies for their own benefit.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER
Today the target is TikTok, which is used chiefly by younger people to catch the latest viral video. But, increasingly it has become a platform for conservative commentators and influencers who feel that other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter dramatically limit their audience and shadow ban them from communicating with their followers.
It is not too much of a stretch to imagine an embattled President Biden, with allegations that his son received large payments from China, deciding it’s time to get tough with China.
The DATA Act gives Biden the power to ban TikTok. Or the threat of a ban could let the Biden administration negotiate with TikTok to change its algorithm to restrict opinion posts that disagree with his policies.
Future Presidents will also have this power. Imagine a re-elected Donald Trump deciding that Facebook or Google are being influenced by China, so he issues the order banning them from American phones. Since those companies have significant business operations in China, Trump would have a plausible argument under the DATA Act that he has the power to ban them.
Americans increasingly use their phones to manage every facet of their lives – from travel to banking to news and entertainment. Giving the government the power to ban apps and pick and choose between competing apps is a huge restriction on phone freedom.
