NEW YORK—This week, it was announced that the House is looking to pass a package of foreign aid bills that includes an updated version of the TikTok ban bill. The bill could be law as soon as next week. In March, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the bill – known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act – that would require ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to divest in the app or face a federal ban.

The following can be attributed to Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is the wrong way to address concerns about social media platforms’ practices. Longstanding Supreme Court precedent protects Americans’ First Amendment right to access information, ideas, and media from abroad. By banning TikTok, the bill would infringe on this right, and with no real pay-off. China and other foreign adversaries could still purchase Americans’ sensitive data from data brokers on the open market. And they could still engage in disinformation campaigns using American-owned platforms. Legislators who are genuinely concerned about social media platforms’ practices have better options at their disposal, and we continue to urge lawmakers to lean in to those rather than undermining the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.”

Last year, the Knight Institute, representing a coalition of social media researchers, challenged Texas’s TikTok ban as applied to faculty in the state’s public universities. Read more about that case here. 

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, [email protected].