No matter how you view TikTok, banning the platform would be censorship

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Dear Senator Schumer,

I am writing to give you a different perspective on the bill now in front of the Senate. The bill forces TikTok to decouple from Chinese ownership and, barring some miracle, will effectively ban it in the United States.

As a Ph.D. student and media scholar at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University studying social media behavior, I concur with you a lot about TikTok that you already know. TikTok’s proprietary “For You” algorithm is designed to build a personality profile around you and serve you with only the most instantly mesmerizing content. It’s made TikTok the most successful app in history, surpassing Google as the world’s most visited web domain.

And for many students here at SU, it’s become an addiction akin to nicotine. I did a study last year, and many students admitted they can spend up to five hours a day watching TikTok videos. Research also shows that excessive TikTok watching leads to “digital dementia,” causing anxiety, depression and the loss of attention span.

I am not a big fan of TikTok, but I am against banning it. Before returning to school, I lived and worked in China for 17 years as an advertising executive in American and British firms. I personally witnessed the growth of Bytedance and the dominance of Douyin, TikTok’s sister platform in China. During that time, I also saw the dramatic rise of Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube and online news platforms such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, which the Chinese government all effectively blocked because they didn’t follow the Communist Party line.

It is for this reason that I am opposed to the bill banning TikTok. It is fundamentally un-American and we are simply following China’s censorship playbook. Blocking TikTok in any way effectively stops one of the core values that both you and I hold dearly, which is also our strength: openness. Are we willing to follow China and apply it here? America is better than this.

The argument is that the Chinese Communist Party is extracting data from us. If the Chinese government wanted to get our data, they could find many different ways. They could take a chapter from Russia and simply go to X, formerly known as Twitter, or Meta and do not need their own platform. Fueled by artificial intelligence, our American social media platforms are so porous and flawed, but our congressional leaders seem to do little about them despite hearings after hearings. And Americans simply do not value data privacy compared to other countries. Your bank credit score knows more about you than any piece of data that the CCP knew about me back in China.

There has only been speculation of a massive TikTok data breach without much hard evidence, only to say, “they could if they wanted to.” And given easily accessible data alternatives, why would the CCP jeopardize a highly-profitable company? TikTok is a cash cow, and it would be bad business to disrupt it, especially now that the Chinese economy is experiencing a slowdown.

There are better solutions than what Congress is proposing. What ever happened to Project Texas, the plan to house TikTok data in Oracle servers which would be Apple’s equivalent in China under their data localization laws? Project Texas would have been a reasonable compromise if we were worried about data leaving our shores.

Some have also argued that the CCP is using TikTok to spread anti-American propaganda. If this were the case, it wouldn’t seem to be working. Why wouldn’t the CCP use TikTok to improve American opinions on China? American opinions on China are now at an all-time low.

Why is Congress doing this? It’s an emotional reaction to our government’s failure to control social media. If TikTok’s addictive and potentially harmful algorithm leaves our youth due to the ban, platforms like Meta will pick up the slack.

We are so worried that the CCP will undermine democracy, so what do we do? Block or ban a social media platform. I have lived under a censorious regime, and I can tell you it is not something we want for our country.