TikTok Goes From Silly to Serious

“Most sectors of the economy are a conspiracy between the big incumbents and their punitive regulators,” venture capitalist and software engineer Marc Andreessen tells Reason this month (page 48). Asked to identify pockets of relative freedom and competition, he offers what he calls “the cynical answer”: There’s still innovation “in the spaces that don’t matter. Anybody can bring a new toy to market. Anybody can open a restaurant.”

- By Katherine Mangu-Ward

Social media is the latest industry to transition from a free, fun space that “doesn’t matter” to a sector the state deems too important to be left to the market. At first, the justifications for intervention were numerous and rapidly shifting: Early calls to regulate or break up Facebook and Twitter were often framed as concerns about exclusion from speech in the public square or the spread of misinformation. (Largely absent from this argument was any acknowledgment that these are private companies or that, as it turns out, the government was pressuring those companies to do some of the very exclusions and misinformation peddling that the government promised to remedy.) Another strong contender for concern was the sheer size of the firms, which could open the door for antitrust action. And then there’s the ongoing debate over whether the costs to teen mental health are so high and age verification so difficult that perhaps access to social media should be limited or eliminated for everyone.

Those regulatory efforts continue apace, but their appeal has paled in contrast to a shiny new target.

After a variety of feints at Facebook and Twitter, Congress has found fertile ground for political point scoring with TikTok. Once dismissed as the home of silly dance videos, TikTok became a magnet for every possible cultural concern as it grew in popularity. After alarmists tried worrying about political extremism, viral pranks, and the normalization of twerking, a bipartisan coalition settled around a dominant bogeyman: China.