One of the things that my journal allows me to do is to think and write about subjects on which I have little or no expertise. I suspect that I’m not the only person who occasionally thinks about something that is pretty much outside of the scope of my expertise. At the annual meeting of our Conference this weekend, one of the speakers commented on how the United States legislative branch has been so unproductive in recent years. While our society faces challenges and problems such as a housing crisis, a healthcare crisis, out of control drug costs, major injustices and the specter of global climate change, the legislature can barely pass any legislation at all and when they do take responsibility and fulfill their constitutional mandate to fund governmental services instead of solving the challenges that lie before the country they decide to ban TicTok, a social media platform with 150,000 users in the United States. Furthermore, it is a media used by a majority of teens. It is also favored by teens of color. Around 20% of Black teens use TikTok, About 32% of Hispanic teens say they use the platform. Like many other things in our country, it appears that the impact of a ban, if it goes through, will disproportionately affect young people and people of color.

To be clear, the legislation, signed into law by President Biden on April 24, does not ban TicTok yet. The law requires the company that owns TicTok, Bytedance, to sell its stake in the company within the next nine months, with a further 3-month grace period, or face a potential ban in the United States. Bytedance has said it has no interest in selling its stake in the media platform.

I am not a teen. Nor am I Hispanic or African-American. I do not have a TicTok account. I know just a little bit about the app, which has been used as a platform for short videos featuring dance and other art forms. One thing of which I am fairly sure, however, is that the United States is not the only market for the platform. And, if it is banned in this country, it won’t be the first large country to ban its use. Despite the fact that the rationale for introducing the potential ban is far that data from TicTok might be turned over to the government of China for its use in spreading propaganda and seeking to influence elections in foreign countries, TicTock has been banned in China. It is also banned in India, where it was immensely popular prior to that country’s banning the application last fall.

From at least one perspective, social media platforms come and go at a rapid pace. As soon as one is adopted, another shows up on the scene. When it was started, FaceBook was popular among teens, but they quickly left the platform as it became the preferred social media of Baby Boomers. Twitter seems to have peaked out in terms of the number of users. Instagram and YouTube are still widely popular, but one never knows what new venue for the expression of identity and formation of community will arise next. I suspect that the result of the ban would be a fairly quick pivot to some different media. I furthermore suspect that new media will be as strident in collecting data on users and susceptible to governments forcing it to share that data. Tell people they cannot use TikTok, and there will soon be another platform that is adopted by large numbers of people. The advance of technology seems to be far beyond the power of legislatures to control.

I know that the ban, like many other things that get scooped into packages of legislation, was included in this bill in part to gain support for the bill from people who might not have supported it had the ban not been included. Single issue legislators can wield disproportionate power by threatening to prevent a particularly important or much needed piece of legislation from becoming law. The TicTok ban was rolled into legislation providing energy support to critical allies in a time of unprecedented turmoil in the world. Ukraine is desperately awaiting further military support form the US. That support was promised, but could not be delivered until the bill passed and was signed into law. The same is true of funding for Israel as it struggles to respond to the brutal attacks by Hamas. The bill further includes funding for Taiwan. Funding for the three allies totals $95 billion.

As I hinted earlier, I don’t have any stake in the attempt to force the sale of TikTok. I don’t use it, don’t understand it fully, and doubt that whether or not it is banned will make much a difference in the issues that are most important to me as a citizen.

Again, I’m no expert, but it seems from what others tell me that TikTok has a culture that allows small producers, without having millions of followers, to post grass roots movies and other expressions. That should give the media a more homey and amateur vibe, which has its own appeal. To the extent that TikTok encourages regular users to post, it holds the potential to distinguish it from some of the other social media platforms. YouTube these days is dominated by people who have figured out how to make videos of sufficient quality that they are used to produce significant income for posters. This in turn creates a means for those who post regularly to YouTube to be able to afford professional film editors, full time camera operators, and a host of special effects that simply are not accessible to less well-funded individuals. TicTok seems to favor those who don’t have paid staff or professional editing equipment and expertise.

Instagram’s sort movie feed, Reels, and YouTube’s Shorts are seeking to appeal to the TikTok crowd. It remains to be seen whether one of these will emerge as the dominant player this year.

While all of these dynamics play out, I suspect that most legislators, like me, will quickly forget about the issues involved in the ban while the country rapidly moves on to new modes of expression.