What year is it? All this talk of a TikTok ban makes it feel like 2020 again.

But this time it might eventuate. Last week the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would require TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell to a US company or face a national “ban”. Time will tell if it will pass the Senate, but this is the closest the US has come to a national ban since Donal Trump floated the idea four years ago.

More broadly than TikTok, the bill would allow the US president to designate non-US social media apps as national security threats, forcing them to ensure they have no ties to a “US adversary” within six months. That’s a pretty incredible precedent to set. In addition to constitutional concerns about free speech, it flies in the face of notions of a free and open web, instead exacerbating US techno-imperialism.

On its face the prospect of a ban appears to be a result of a steady thrum of discontent and frankly, moral panic, about TikTok. (It’s important to remember that not all of these concerns are organic – in 2022 Meta paid for an astroturf campaign to sow distrust and turn sentiment against its rival.)

And, to be fair, TikTok sucks for lots of reasons: it’s a privacy nightmare; its recommender system takes users down harmful content........

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