Illustration by Anaelda Ramos

My first ever smartphone was a Windows 8 Nokia — yes, a Windows phone. It came housed in a soft, mushy plastic shell, paired with a crusty slide-out keyboard. Its battery flew out when you dropped it, and it didn’t even have Snapchat or Instagram. It was a sacrilegious device made for the sacrilegious hipster, one dumb enough to trust the Office software company to make something not intended for a cubicle jungle. In other words, it was an abject failure, a tarnish on Microsoft’s then-34-year history. CEOs have been fired for much less.  

Through a string of failed acquisitions and such missed opportunities, the once-lauded Microsoft crawled through the 2010s in a barrage of criticism and doubt. What followed was more than a lost decade; this was a Goliath of unforced errors. Yet, as the calendar swung to the 2020s, Microsoft came out stronger than ever, and now prospers again as the world’s most valuable company. But their better health was not earned through riding on Bill Gates’ coattails. It was a series of bloody wounds formed into iron scars, from negligence into perseverance — and indeed, a lot of regulation.  

TikTok reminds me of the beginnings of Microsoft, one of a scrappy, culturally revolutionary firm entering a hostile market just to disrupt and revolutionize it all. TikTok, and their Chinese parent company ByteDance, should be congratulated for this seismic shift that has taken the historically-dominant U.S. tech industry by storm. Today, you would be challenged to not find major social media players like Reddit, X, and Meta touting a “video-first” content agenda, a desperate entry into a largely-decided battle. TikTok represents a significant upending of U.S. cultural dominance, and as many TikTok users will attest to, a win for our ever-connecting world.  

However, on March 7, 2024, TikTok users were greeted with a message that can best be described as divisive, and to many government representatives, a naked threat on U.S. democracy. In response to growing fears of geopolitical interference by Chinese state actors, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a measure to ban the app on grounds of national security. This was swiftly followed by a full screen declaration of war on the video platform, claiming that users must “speak up now” before “your government strips 170 million Americans of their constitutional right of freedom expression.” On the bottom of this unavoidable popup was a plea to call your local representatives, paired with a convenient field to enter your ZIP code.  

This backfired. Congress overwhelmingly lambasted ByteDance’s actions as politically inflammatory as a flood of threats were sent to aides and representatives. Now, and perhaps more than ever, Washington is energized to ban the sole platform that beat the West’s grip on our social networks. Forget an iron curtain — we are being cut off by a federally-funded firewall, from sea to shining sea.  

I deeply empathize with those who may grieve losing such a revolutionary online platform, especially one as effective at disseminating ideas as TikTok. In many ways, TikTok has been an agent of democracy through its ability to promote underrepresented political ideology.  

Despite this, it should be emphasized that saving TikTok is not saving democracy. This ban is but a symptom of an increasingly hostile American media culture that helps cause mass shootings and gets authoritarians elected. It is a repetitive, vicious cycle, and one that threatens our democratic principles as we know them. 

The history of authoritarian nations meddling with democracy is well known. Russia infamously poisoned the 2016 election. Iran incited chaos in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. China continues to post fabricated content to radicalize voters. In a world where these authoritarian powers have their own firewalls while the shores of U.S. media lay bare, I can only empathize with the legislative agenda of protecting ourselves against a nation with great — and already established — need to interfere with our most basic democratic practices. 

Yet, and perhaps most disappointingly, it must be acknowledged that American tech companies have done much of the same. Our online world is rife with hateful content, propagated by nearly every one of our American tech platforms. I cannot stand going on many of them, X and Instagram especially, as divisive content is purposefully promoted. 

To be clear, I am not in favor of a ban against TikTok — free, global trade should be celebrated, not punished. Yet when our biggest adversary has a legal right to spy through their social platforms, including TikTok, the question of regulation becomes less of efficiency and more of national security. 

It is necessary to acknowledge the damage foreign meddling can do, and has done, to our relationship with this nation, a house now divided and crumbling. It is even worse to know that those causing the destruction are profiting so heavily from it, whether domestic or abroad. 

Regulating TikTok should be encouraged. The current state of social media should not.