Banning TikTok: a simple solution, and the wrong one

The ongoing dilemma with TikTok in the United States illustrates what happens when a government believes that the problem is a social network being in the hands of another country’s government, when in reality the problem lies in the very essence of how social networks work, whoever owns them.

The fact that the only thing the United States Congress can agree on almost unanimously during an entire legislature is a law, “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” (also monitor the Wikipedia page about it), aimed at forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company within six months under the threat of banning it, shows that, as Henry Louis Mencken said, “for every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong”. And for some members of Congress to make excuses to their millions of TikTok followers doesn’t fix anything.

Banning TikTok is a simple solution: countries such as Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan and Somalia have already done so, while Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Taiwan, have banned its installation on devices owned by their governments. Convincing a number of politicians to vote in favor of a ban using dodgy arguments exposes the sad mediocrity of today’s politics, but does not probe the reasons for banning a…