Gutless and Technology Ignorant: Congress, President Biden and the Supreme Court Have all Failed Americans with the TikTok Ban

It's Not Acceptable to Make and Interpret Laws about a Technology You Don't Understand, Used by 65% of the US; on which Seven Million Americans Make a Living

Oh, the humanity. We are now living in a reality in the US in which Congress hurriedly and without discussion voted in a law that banned TikTok, an app where 65% of Americans find joy, community, and earn much-needed money.

Congress now claims they had to vote for because it was shoved into a “must pass” bill due to its foreign aid component; a bill that Meta lobbyists lined the pockets of Congress to encourage passing. And then, President Biden blithely signed it into law, and then the Supreme Court in a unanimous (!) decision, upheld the law.

How is it acceptable to pass a law, any law, without due process in Congress? Without any discussion? Lumped in with other laws that have nothing to do with it?

From the SCOTUS hearing in January 2025, it was evident not a single one of the justices had even been on TikTok. Not one. (If you have evidence to the contrary, do let me know).

For the passage of the law in Congress, there was no discussion, no fact-finding, no opportunity for the American people to have their voices heard. And make no mistake; a majority of Americans are on TikTok.

H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — passed unanimously in both the House and the Senate. But now, conveniently, facing backlash from their constituents (remember your constituents, Congress? The people you are supposed to represent?), they throw up the excuses that they had to pass the bill because the foreign aid was so important — they didn’t realize what they were doing with TikTok! Aw gee!

Seriously? So we are now living in a world where foreign aid — to places like Ukraine and Somalia — are more important than the wishes of the majority of Americans? Who did not even have a chance to express their views to their own elected representatives?

Charity Begins at Home

Don’t get me wrong; foreign aid can be good…but you know the old expression, charity begins at home? We need to put on our own oxygen masks first. And we have plenty of problems in this country that need addressing — school shootings, homelessness, poverty, drug addiction,,, but an app that makes people happy is the enemy?

Ignorance of Modern Technology Is Not Acceptable in Today’s World

The TikTok ban addressed a technology and phenomenon that we have never seen before — social media that is global. For the first time, Americans could see what was going on in the world for themselves. Although fearmongering about psyops and tracking Americans were used as reasons to ban the company (unless it divested; something its parent company has repeatedly said it will not do), there was zero evidence that any tracking or nefarious activity by China had taken place on the app. And in four years of my using the app I have seen zero Chinese propaganda.

Indeed, one of the reasons behind the scenes was concern that the plebes were seeing the world with a new lens, such as the war in Gaza, According to Truthout.org, “Last fall, Jonathan Greenblatt, president of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), was recorded saying, “we really have a TikTok problem, a Gen-Z problem,” and groups like the Jewish Federations of North America and the Republican Jewish Coalition have applauded the TikTok ban.

And while some members of Congress “get it,” such as Ro Khanna, who voted against the bill, and Ed Markey and Cory Booker (who initially voted for it but later saw it was wrong, and are along with Khanna now helping to spearhead the effort to save TikTok), the Supreme Court justices all seemed clueless about what TikTok was all about and the technology issues at hand.

Is It Like an Old Shirt?

Sam Alito, who recently asked if Pornhub had articles like Playboy, compared TikTok to an old shirt users might just be attached to...but oh it’s just silly, isn’t it? They could just get a new shirt.

No, Justice Alito, they can’t just get a new TikTok like a new shirt; it’s a complicated algorithm that other tech co’s have been trying to copy and so far failed.

Justice Sotomayor contemplated how ByteDance could simply make the code “open source.” Are you kidding me? Do you thinkin a million years Apple or Meta would make their proprietary code open source? I mean, it is a business after all. There’s such a thing as proprietary technology.

Now I know the justices are busy. But they have clerks and aides, and I would guess a lot of them are young — Gen Z or millennials — that they could have directed to spend at least a few hours on TikTok and advise them what it was all about.

Some Law Scholars Concur

I’m not the only one saying this, of course. You’ve got legal scholars weighing in as well.

Dennis Kennedy, the director of the Center for Law, Technology and Innovation at the MSU College of Law, an expert on the use of technology as it relates to law practice, wrote, “The TikTok divestiture scenario highlights a fundamental mismatch: a legal system designed for a slower era grappling with technologies that change at lightning speed and, in the case of TikTok, [apps] which not only serve as social hubs for millions but also fuel a significant creator economy that young people depend on. History, from Prohibition to Napster, shows that blunt-force, top-down regulatory approaches often backfire, creating more problems than they solve.

“In fact, applying them to a dynamic platform intertwined with the creator economy is a recipe for unintended consequences. It’s time for a fundamental rethink of how we govern technology in the 21st century and move beyond reactive, case-by-case court battles and company-targeted legislation and create an agile and comprehensive national tech policy framework fit for our digital age. In this case, both TikTok and the tech landscape have dramatically changed since April 2024 when the law directed at TikTok was signed, and a new administration is coming into office.

“Are we comfortable with having a judicial system that struggles to keep pace with and is always playing catch up to technological advancements with global impact determine the fate of platforms that might be central to the economic future of a generation, especially as we start to face the many difficult issues AI is bringing us? As I’ve heard many people say, ‘Why are they taking away our TikTok when there are so many more important issues they could be addressing?”

Look, I’m 59..I’m not one of the many Gen Z peeps on TikTok. But some in the other generations are on there. And as someone who worked in the very early Internet — I was at AOL from 1988 to 1997 — I became used to adapting to new technologies and the evolving Internet.

I’ve seen web sites and companies come and go — CompuServe, Prodigy, Netscape, UUnet, Napster, MySpace. I remember when Facebook was just for college students. So I’ve become accustomed to keeping up with the times, as it were.

But when technology changes so much and an app or other entity becomes so big, and keeping up with it is not hard —it requires only dowloading an app and spending a few hours on it — I feel there is no excuse for demonizing it — not without due diligence.

And due diligence was not done here. It’s a dark day in America.

Perhaps incoming President Trump can fix this mess. but it will not be easy after all three branches of government snuck in, passed, and then affirmed a law that does nothing but hurt the American people.