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After a dramatic weekend, TikTok is alive. For now.

Last year, Congress passed – by large bipartisan majorities – a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to either sell the site to American owners or be shut down. ByteDance took their case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ban this month.

TikTok’s owners insisted they wouldn’t sell. Despite the outgoing Biden administration declining to enforce the law, TikTok shut down on the night of Saturday the 18th. It came back the next day, purportedly with assurances from Donald Trump that he won’t ban it either.

But even if TikTok comes back for good, there’s a sword of Damocles hanging over it. Its existence is at the whim of the executive branch, which can choose whether to enforce the ban or suspend it.

If Trump allows it to exist, it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to suspect he’ll demand something in return. Will TikTok use its algorithm to push messages friendly to his campaign? Will it stifle his critics?

A shameful first

Like 170 million other Americans, I have a TikTok account. Its algorithm learns from what you watch and what you skip, so what you see depends on what you’re interested in.

Like every social media site, it has lots of vapid content and misinformation. But there’s good stuff there as well. My feed is mostly science and nature videos, beautiful places, books and progressive politics. It’s also a good source of breaking news, the way Twitter used to be long ago.

I don’t make videos too often, but I’ve experimented with posting content on TikTok about atheism and secularism, which got a reasonably good response. If China is using it to push propaganda on me, I’ve yet to notice.

As I wrote on OnlySky, the TikTok ban is a shameful first in American history. It’s at risk of being shut down not because of anything it’s done, but because lawmakers feared what it might do. It’s not even a punishment for speech – it’s a punishment for hypothetical speech!

Notwithstanding the court’s blessing, this is a horrible precedent. It’s now accepted constitutional interpretation that “national security” needs override the First Amendment – that the American government, at the very least, can ban any viewpoint or platform that originates from another country. Why couldn’t this argument be used to ban a Chinese-language newspaper, or a media website like the BBC or Al Jazeera?

If the argument is that China could influence TikTok’s algorithm to control what views people are exposed to, or harvest personal info to blackmail us… then why is it the only platform subject to that concern? Why don’t the same “national security” concerns apply to American social media companies run by American billionaires? The oath of citizenship says “enemies foreign and domestic”, after all.

You’re not the customer, you’re the product

By any measure, American social-media companies have done worse than anything that TikTok is accused of. Their algorithms have amplified harassment, toxic conspiracy theories, bigoted rumors, and right-wing misinformation. They’ve contributed to violent radicalization, the spread of fascism, even genocide. They’ve harvested massive quantities of data about us, with no constraints on how they use them.

In fact, Facebook has sold user data to China and to Russia. That’s the very thing we were supposed to be afraid of TikTok doing. Why isn’t Facebook facing a forced divestment or shutdown?

To be clear, I don’t think that TikTok is the “good” social media platform. Fundamentally, all social media companies are for-profit businesses with the goal of collecting user data and monetizing it. It’s just that TikTok is on the rising side of the enshittification curve, the phase when a platform wants to make its user experience pleasant to build an audience. Facebook and Twitter long since passed the peak and are sliding down the other side. If TikTok lasts for the long term, I don’t doubt the same thing will happen.

Instead of targeting TikTok in particular, Congress could have passed comprehensive social-media regulation that applied to every platform alike. That would have been fair and welcome. Such a law could have given us control of our personal data, like Europe’s GDPR, letting us decide who can collect it and what they can do with it. It could have mandated that social media offer non-algorithmic feeds, giving us the choice of what content we want to see. It could have guaranteed interoperability, giving us the right to delete our data or transfer it to a different platform.

But instead, they did… this. It’s roaring hypocrisy for Congress to ban a Chinese-owned company from doing the same things that American companies have been doing, successfully and profitably, for years. It puts the lie to anyone who claims that America has either free speech or a free market.

Flocking to China’s welcoming embrace

However, Americans aren’t sitting back and taking this. In an act of collective spite, they’re flocking to a Chinese social media app, Rednote. So many people have downloaded it, they’ve pushed it to #1 on app stores worldwide.

In fact, Rednote is a colloquial translation. The Chinese name of the app, Xiaohongshu, more accurately translates as “Little Red Book“. If the U.S. government wanted to stop American citizens from being influenced by China… it’s safe to say they failed catastrophically.

Rednote is similar to TikTok, but it’s hosted on servers in China. It has no American presence that a U.S. law or court would have jurisdiction over (although it could be removed from U.S. app stores).

The influx of Americans on what used to be an exclusively Chinese app has sparked fascinating conversations. People are swapping memes and jokes, answering questions about each other’s countries, even helping each other with their homework. It’s a true social experiment – perhaps the first large-scale cultural exchange between the U.S. and China.

I admit I’m curious, but also wary. Although I think the American government blundered badly with this ban, I don’t believe China is our savior. The honeymoon isn’t going to last.

Some Americans on Rednote have been shocked by the high quality of life in China, which they’re seeing for the first time. If that motivates them to demand more from their own government, so much the better. However, China isn’t the template we should be seeking to copy.

China isn’t a democracy. It has no freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion. There’s no due process; you can be disappeared or imprisoned at a party official’s whim. Chinese citizens need permission not just to leave China, but to travel or move internally within its borders (the hukou system). China props up totalitarian regimes like Russia and North Korea and wants to conquer democratic Taiwan. It has little or no tolerance for LGBTQ+ people and other minorities.

That said, it’s not as if the U.S. is a shining example of liberty to contrast with Chinese repression. We’re hurtling backwards on LGBTQ+ and minority rights. While the Chinese regime censors Tiananmen Square, American legislators want to ban books and outlaw history lessons. While China controls its citizens’ movements, red states want to round up immigrants and make it illegal for pregnant people to travel to get an abortion. The U.S. has colonized other countries and engaged in imperialist wars of its own. And now, for the first time ever, the U.S. censors foreign media just like China does.

Besides, whatever China’s government does, it’s not the fault of ordinary Chinese people. They can say that they have no responsibility for the actions of their state, because they never got to vote on it – a claim Americans can’t make!

There’s no telling what will become of TikTok. I haven’t decided whether to give Rednote a try. But whatever social media platforms I’m on, I’ll always be a lover of free speech.

No matter what, I believe we’re better off when people can express their views and talk to each other. I don’t want anyone – not China’s government, not America’s government, and certainly not a handful of billionaire oligarchs – deciding what I can and can’t see on the internet. I don’t trust anyone with that kind of power.