Last week, the Supreme Court upheld the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which effectively bans TikTok on national security grounds. In spite of this, the fight isn’t over; enforcing the ban would be up to the incoming Trump administration, and Trump has recently said that he’s still deciding how to proceed.
On one level, the impulse to ban TikTok is understandable. The social media app can be used in prosocial ways, but it can also do a lot of damage. One internal report by the company found that TikTok overuse caused “negative emotions,” and “interfered with [users’] obligations and productivity,” which led to “lost sleep, missed deadlines, poor school performance, running late, etc.” Another internal report put it even more bluntly: “Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” and also “interfer[es] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”
The app is especially bad for young people, who are already struggling with poor mental health. Fully 42 percent of Gen Zers have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Sixty percent of Gen Zers take medication to try to manage their mental health. Fifty-seven percent of teen girls report feeling “persistently sad or hopeless,” and roughly 1 in 3 have seriously considered attempting suicide.
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes a compelling case that social media use is a huge driver of this mental health crisis. He quotes one study that asked some college students to greatly reduce their presence on social media, compared to a control group that did not. The authors of the study report that, “the limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group.” As Haidt writes, dozens of studies show the same effect: “Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate.”
A Pew report finds that an astounding 16 percent of American teens age 13-17 report being on TikTok “almost constantly.” That’s about 3.4 million young Americans. If the app is as bad for young people as these studies suggest, then it’s responsible for a sizable chunk of the poor mental health of American teens.
One reason that TikTok is so bad for young people may be that it was designed that way. In Defense One, Josh Baughman and Peter W. Singer note that China is obsessed with the idea of “cognitive warfare,” which involves capturing and manipulating the minds of its enemies. The authors report that, “Unlike US defense documents and strategic thinkers, the People’s Liberation Army puts cognitive warfare on par with the other domains of warfare like air, sea, and space, and believes it key to victory — particularly victory without war.” Troublingly, “Social media platforms are viewed as the main battlefield of this fight.” Or as the Supreme Court wrote in its decision on Friday, there are “well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”
But even with all that in mind, it would be a grave mistake for United States lawmakers to ban the app.
In many ways, the arguments in favor of banning TikTok can be traced back to philosopher Karl Popper. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper articulates what he calls the “paradox of tolerance”: the idea that “if we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Popper is clear that rebutting bad ideologies in the marketplace of ideas is preferred, but claims that we should nevertheless “claim the right even to suppress them” in order to protect our tolerant society from them. If there was ever a case to ban something on the grounds that it might destroy our tolerant society from within, that something would be an app designed by our geopolitical opponents to capture and weaken the minds of young Americans.
The problem with Popper’s paradox is that a free society must tolerate bad ideas, even ideas that might — if allowed to germinate — lead to its ruin. The reason is not simply pragmatic (though there’s a lot of evidence that the best antidote to bad speech is more speech and, as anyone who’s ever been a teenager knows, sometimes banning something can run the risk of making it appear cool). The deeper reason is philosophical. The minute we ban platforms because people on them espouse ideas that we think are bad, or because they encourage behavior that we think is self-destructive, we cease to be a free society. In our zeal to avoid being slain by the foes of freedom, we accidentally turn the knife on ourselves.
The call to let TikTok remain in the United States is not a wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed willingness to capitulate to the desires of those who would do us harm. Instead, it is adherence to a higher principle: that we are a free society. This freedom is something that we should all cherish, and that we should defend aggressively at the cultural level. But a principle isn’t a principle if we violate it at the first sign of danger. The minute we start banning platforms because we don’t like the behavior that those platforms encourage, we cease to be a free society in practice.
Instead of banning TikTok, perhaps we should treat it the same way that we do alcohol. Alcohol is a substance that can be used prosocially, but can also do immense harm; and a lot of the harm happens when it’s accessed by minors. When we see TikTok this way, it becomes clear that there’s a lot we can do to minimize the harms of the app without banning it.
As Greg Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) recommends, we can push to make schools phone-free. We can continue to highlight the negative mental health effects of TikTok, so that parents and teens can make informed decisions about whether or not (or how) to use the app. As Haidt recommends, we can pass laws that restrict the app to users who are 16 years or older, and encourage TikTok to implement age verification that actually works.
When we see the harms propagated by a social media app like TikTok, it’s natural to want to limit those harms. But that doesn’t mean we should ban the app. Such a ban might do more harm to our free society than TikTok ever could.