WASHINGTON—House lawmakers today passed a bill that could ban TikTok for users in the U.S. 

The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. 

“This bill is a betrayal of the First Amendment's most basic principles and a great gift to authoritarians around the world, who will soon be citing it to justify new restrictions on their own citizens' access to ideas, information, and media from abroad. The bill is also a missed opportunity, because Congress can address the most serious problems associated with TikTok without restricting Americans’ access to one of the world’s most popular communications platforms. It should begin by passing a comprehensive privacy law.”

Yesterday, the Knight Institute and 23 other free speech, tech policy, and civil liberties organizations sent a letter to the House urging it to oppose the ban. Read the letter here.

Read Jaffer’s New York Times guest essay, “There’s a Problem With Banning TikTok. It’s Called the First Amendment,” here.

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.