Action Alert
Tell Congress Not to Ban TikTok
Congress wants TikTok to find a new owner within the next 180 days or be banned until it does so. But the US government has not justified silencing the speech of Americans who use TikTok, nor has it justified the indirect punishment of a forced sale.
The bill’s sponsors have argued that the amount of private data available to and collected by the companies behind TikTok and other applications — and in theory, shared with a foreign government — makes them a national security threat. But this bill won’t stop this data sharing. Instead, it will reduce our rights online.
tELL CONGRESS: stop the tiktok ban
User data will still be collected by numerous platforms—possibly even TikTok after a forced sale—and it will still be sold to data brokers who can then sell it elsewhere, just as they do now. What we need is a law that prohibits the collection of our data in the first place.
Last year the courts even blocked a TikTok ban from going into effect in Montana, ruling that the state law violated users’ and the company's First Amendment rights. We shouldn’t waste time arguing over another law that will get thrown out for silencing the speech of millions of Americans. Congress should solve the real problem of out-of-control privacy invasions by enacting comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation. We
need your help to let them know.
Yours,
Jason Kelley
Activism Team
Electronic Frontier Foundation
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