Let’s not pretend this is about countering communist China or protecting Americans. It’s about using CCP tactics here at home. //

Namely, the push to “ban” TikTok is a thinly veiled scheme to force ByteDance to sell to a U.S. company. The purpose of forcing a sale should be obvious. If a U.S. firm owns TikTok, the federal censorship industrial complex can use the platform as it has used virtually every other social media company: to spy on and manipulate American citizens. //

The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was banned from Twitter, Facebook, and most other social media platforms almost as soon as it was reported, was only possible because of the leverage that federal intelligence agencies had over these social media companies.

Over the past year, we’ve learned more and more about the depth and breadth of collusion between Big Tech and the federal government, which views social media companies as proxies that enable it to censor and manipulate American citizens. Anything that cuts against the deep state’s preferred narrative is labeled as “misinformation” that must be suppressed, censored, or banned. Instead of doing this directly, the intelligence community dragoons social media companies into carrying out these tasks, and the effect is the quashing of free speech online.

Make no mistake, this is the goal of the movement to “ban” TikTok. How else to explain the effort to force a TikTok sale? If the goal was really to ban TikTok (because the CCP uses it to collect data on American citizens, or because it’s harmful to its users’ mental health, or both) then Congress would have simply passed a bill that banned the app from stores and web-hosting services in the United States. It could have been a straightforward, one-page bill.