 Last week, the House of Representatives voted 352 to 65 to force Bite Dance, the red Chinese parent company of the wildly popular video app TikTok to sell off its U.S. operations to an American firm by September, or TikTok will be banned in the United States and America. It took just eight days from the bill's introduction to get the thing passed, which is a little bit fast for Washington, President Joseph Robin at Biden II has indicated that he would like to sign such a bill, but don't quite pop those champagne bottles just yet. Josh Hawley, or should I say sparkling wine, American sparkling wine bottles, because the Senate might kick this thing down to the Commerce Committee, which would gum up the works considerably. And there are plenty of powerful people who are aligned against the bill, including a flip-flopping, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, as well as Reason's own Robbie Suave. So, Katherine, I've seen a lot of ambient irritation at libertarians about this issue, saying that we tend to be naive and what part about having the CCP have access to all your teenagers' data, don't you understand, kind of thing. So can you explain slowly, perhaps, to skeptics of our broad position if we have one? What is our position and why are we all soft on commies? Yeah, I mean, my position, at least, I would certainly not presume to speak for all libertarians on this topic in particular, which is oddly scrambling people's into it. Like, the number of people who have shown up in my Twitter feed or in my inbox with roughly the same take that I have on this issue that I do not expect to see there, it's been a weird one. Like, current affairs out here was a good take on this recently. That was one, and so... That's just because they're soft on the Chai comms. They're soft on the Chai comms, and so am I. I love Chai comms for their own commercial activities. I'm definitely clipping that. I love Chai comms, just put it on a bumper sticker. It's gonna go on TikTok. So, right, the position here is, there are a few different parts. The most fundamental one is that this is a speech issue and a free association issue. These are platforms that people are using to do all kinds of speech, including political speech, which should be very, very wary of Congress acting to restrict places where people speak about Congress, among other things. Second, no one is forced to use TikTok, and that is a very, very important part of this conversation that weirdly gets left out. You don't have to be on TikTok. You, as a parent, can tell your child not to be on TikTok. You can take away their phone. You can block TikTok from your router. You can do all kinds of, parents have tools to keep their children off of TikTok if that is what we are concerned about, because of course, we are absolutely sort of mixing together in a kind of indeterminate stew for the children argument with the commies are manipulating our elections arguments in ways that make both arguments extremely unproductive. So, the commies are manipulating our elections argument, really not strong evidence that that is happening. Of course, there is censorship by the platform itself of the content that appears on TikTok. That is true of every platform. We have every platform. Equally true, equally true. I mean, there is no clear evidence that it is more true or more perniciously true on TikTok than it is on other platforms. And again, if it is true, feel free to not use TikTok. If you don't want the Chinese to have your data, cool. Don't use it. I just kind of keep coming back to that. We should not try to beat the Chinese by being more like the Chinese. This is my final point. You know who's super awesome at restricting foreign platforms that encourage free discourse and might be clustered to category social media? China, China does this to maintain control of their citizens. We should not emulate them in this. They are not the way we want to go here. The fact that we have some of the biggest anti-China fear mongers also saying, well, China does it, so we have to do it too. That is exactly the wrong approach. That will always be the wrong approach. Peter, you understand the technology and also like to film yourself doing dances to Taylor Swift songs. Can you walk us through some of the details of the bill, the finer print and what the actual legislation would do? Yeah, so basically what this bill does is it says that if a social media type company, and there's a bunch of carve-outs for actually things that it doesn't cover, certain types of commerce, that sort of thing, but a social media type company like this, if it is owned by a corporation that is headquartered, located, and has strong ties to a foreign adversary nation, which is an official designation by the president of the United States, if it may have to divest itself and you can't have that ownership structure. And so this is, I think, one of the big concerns. Katherine already mentioned the constitutional speech issues here. That's a big deal. But the other thing here is that this empowers the president in many ways to basically decide which social media companies can and cannot operate in the United States. Now, yes, there's a review process. This is not a completely new power on the part of the president. There's already a foreign adversary designation that exists. But this is something that libertarians who are correctly concerned about the CCP and correctly concerned about the CCP's access to TikTok data. That's something that I actually think is at least a legitimate thing to worry about. In order to combat that, this bill is going to empower the US president basically to have the power to ban social media apps. And that's one of the reasons I think we're seeing folks like Elon Musk, like Tucker Carlson, some of these folks who are maybe, sometimes, as Katherine said, there is a delightful coalition of weirdos who have come out against this bill. And one of the reasons is that those weirdos value their ability to speak online. And they see that, well, if you can go after TikTok, maybe you can go after Twitter or X or whichever platform you don't like next. I mean, there's really a kind of, in political coalition terms, this thing is like a midnight drunk dinner at Denny's. You know, it's just totally scrambled. And that's kind of delightful. Oh my God, I hate it. That is so bad. It's like... Yes, those dinners are terrible. On the other hand, I've had a lot of them. If it's walking on Denny's on Sunset, that's fine. Nick, are the fears that underlie all this stuff that people are expressing, are they valid concerns? I mean, is it bad? I don't think so. No, I mean, and partly because the question about the data is, didn't we force ByteDance to sequester US data via Oracle and things like that? So, you know, if that was successful, that's been taken care of. But even that is dubious. But then the other question is, you know, there's two for me. One is like, okay, so TikTok is slowly, and you hear people talk about this, that they're slowly changing the algorithm so that American kids are stupid. You know, they're doing dances instead of, you know, 10-dimensional calculus or something like everybody in China is doing. And they're bleaching out anything that's critical of China, maybe, but although you can still find TMN Square, you know, protest stuff on TikTok, I did that over the weekend. And it's not clear, yeah, it is a dance. It's called the bag band dance. And it, you know, but there's those questions which seem to be completely ridiculous. You know, TikTok is still a super vibrant, you know, platform for all kinds of speech. And then the other thing for me, there's this, you know, what to me, tips us to understand we are in a social media panic is that even people like Elise Stefanik, the Harvard grad who's one of the co-sponsors of all this stuff, constantly in her comments is shifting back and forth between this is a critical threat to our national security and then she's always slipping into, oh, but it's also, you know, so that should be its own thing, right? That somehow China is going to figure out what dance moves are really powerful and then use them against Americans. And then she's always slipping into and it's poisoning the minds of our next generation. You know, so it's like, what is it? Is it that we need to ban TikTok because it is apparatus? It's, you know, the communist international in the 21st century and it's completely run by the Chinese government and it's fucking us up that way or it is turning our children into mush. Because it doesn't seem like that second one then talking about why who owns it doesn't seem to be what Congress would be talking about. To me, this is just the worst kind of hysteria. It's weird in an election year that it is getting, you know, massive bipartisan support and that should be deeply worrying to everybody because this, you know, this passed the house with what, like 50 or 60 dissenting votes and it was a mix of Republicans and Democrats. But this, you know, when consensus starts to form you understand what the real argument is and this is about social media panic. It has nothing to do with China. It has everything to do with the adults feeling like they're no longer able to control the conversation, the political adults. And to, you know, back up Catherine's point, it's just that like, if you're a parent and you don't like your kid being on TikTok that much don't let them be on TikTok that much. That really is the answer. That was a clip from the latest episode of the Reason Roundtable. To watch another clip, click here. To watch the whole episode, click here and make sure to subscribe to the Reason Roundtable. You'll be glad you did.