As I write this, America is on the verge of potentially losing its favorite pastime: TikTok. Though it was only banned for under a day, threats of destruction still loom. Americans have strong opinions on whether TikTok is ultimately helping or harming our nation, and there are persuasive arguments supporting the latter. Our government is suspicious that TikTok is selling private information about citizens to the Chinese government, and many believe that our attention spans suffer significantly because of the app. However, there are a few reasons why I  argue that banning TikTok is not an appropriate measure. 

To address the privacy issue, I need to clarify the evidence and reasoning behind banning TikTok. The federal government is concerned that because TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is a Chinese-owned company, the data of users from TikTok could potentially be accessed by the Chinese government. Shou Chew, the CEO of TikTok, was questioned by a US senator during a congress session regarding his ties with China. Mr. Chew repeatedly stressed that he is a Singaporean citizen and vehemently denied any personal affiliation with the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The biggest fault within the case for a ban is that there is no imminent threat to personal or national security. Security experts who have investigated TikTok state that the scenarios the government is worried about are “a possibility based on what’s publicly known about China’s laws and TikTok’s ownership structure,” but they stress that they are “hypothetical at best.” Chew publicly stated that “the Chinese government has never asked TikTok for its data and that the company would refuse any such request.” TikTok’s attempts to compromise with the US government have proved unsuccessful. The company proposed “Project Texas,: a plan allowing the U.S. government to oversee TikTok’s data practices, but even that wasn’t persuasive enough.

Many Americans worry that the TikTok ban will limit First Amendment rights. In a statement written by Patrick Toomey and Ashley Gorski of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) states that TikTok should be banned only if the government can prove that it poses a “serious, imminent harm to national security” and that our government has not yet produced the evidence to make that claim. The ACLU worries that the TikTok ban is simply an excuse to limit Americans’ access to foreign material and that going through with the ban will set a precedent that “invocations of ‘national security’ will trump our constitutional rights.”

My second argument is that banning TikTok will not benefit American citizens’ health or safety. The argument that TikTok is detrimental to our ability to focus is entirely valid; it has been proven through credible psychological research. The problem is that it isn’t the only app that does so. Facebook reels, Snapchat spotlight, Twitter reels, YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels provide access to the same “short-form media” that TikTok does. Users who find themselves lost without TikTok will quickly substitute it for another app that provides them with the same dopamine hits. Therefore, the ban will do nothing to save the collective attention spans of Americans. Perhaps the funniest outcome of the impending ban is that over half a million TikTok users have already started substituting TikTok for another app: Rednote. Rednote, also known as “小红书” or “Xiaohongshu,” is an entirely Chinese-owned and run company. It was created as “China’s answer to Instagram,” as the app is banned in China and is decidedly more threatening than TikTok regarding security. Chinese users have been welcoming Americans to Rednote by teaching them to speak Mandarin and educating them on Chinese culture, making Americans much more sympathetic to China in general. 

At the end of the day, many Americans feel that a platform they used to express themselves, find communities, and simply have fun is being unfairly taken away from them. Since there will be six years of content lost when the app is removed, users have been posting sentimental videos saying goodbye to the TikTok era, reminiscing on how much they have changed since TikTok first emerged. The removal of TikTok from America is devastating for millions, especially since the ban fails to adequately solve many of the issues it was intended to address.