Opinions can be shaped very quickly, and grudges last a long time. Donald Trump knows that better than most. Joe Biden ought to, but seemingly doesn’t.
How else to explain the naivety of taking TikTok to the limit of extinction, then getting the Supreme Court to uphold a law banning the app without any public evidence of the purported national security risk it is?
While the decision the court made today to require TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its crown jewel app to an American buyer or be banned in two days will have an immediate impact on the app’s 170 million users, it’s the longer-term ramifications that ought to be most worrying.
TikTok’s user base is younger and more politically engaged than most. It’s why the app has been able to put up such a strong fight, and why it managed to stave off execution under the 2016-2020 Trump administration—living on only to be put out of its existence by Joe Biden’s White House. And it’s those tens of millions of young users—who won’t forget what happened today—who will come back to bite politicians of all stripes in the years to come.
“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” the Justices wrote in their decision upholding the law, passed by cross-party consensus in Congress and signed off by Joe Biden last year. Those words are meaningful, as are the words that TikTok’s users, as they try and find a new home, have been using: refugee.
For younger Americans who flocked to TikTok in their droves, the app is a home. They’re twice as likely as the average American to have opposed the ban. And in a world where the online and offline world are now one and the same, often elderly, almost always ignorant elected officials just turfed them out and made them homeless. Never mind the economic impact: social media platforms are the public square, and over very thin looking fears, little more than hearsay, and a full-throated defense of American protectionism, politicians have blown up a public place of congregation.
If there’s one thing that embodies generation Z and other users of TikTok, it’s their political nous and the articulation with which they can rally around a cause. And as the current crop and future generation of voters on whose ballots politicians will have to rely on in the future, they’re likely to remember how elected officials have failed them throughout the TikTok saga.
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