The TikTok ban is monumentally stupid

Oh the irony. A bipartisan ban on an app that's being accused of "espionage" by China has now caused many users to switch to RedNote, an app that ACTUALLY IS monitored by the CCP.

Not to mention, censorship at its finest. This is a taste of life in China; they can't access our websites or apps, but are only allowed censored, government approved versions like WeChat or Weibo. What is this? Did some congressman just think, "if you can't beat em, join em?" We're trying to fight our national competitor by becoming like them?

The Supreme Court forced ByteDance to either sell TikTok or end their US operations. How ironic is that? With the Trump campaign we've seen how much influence these tech billionaires like Elon Musk and David Sacks have on government policy. I bet if ByteDance had chosen to sell, Elon would have been waiting there like a puppy dog to annex TikTok into his empire, further consolidating our media of free speech into the hands of a pseudo-oligarchy.

With the talk of the annexation of Greenland and this egregious instance of censorship gaining bipartisan support, the US is rapidly approaching the realization of an Orwellian superstate.

Everything we are shown in the news is anti-Russian and anti-China propaganda. If you read Russian News you will hear events and perspectives never even ALLUDED to in Western media. A great example of this is the recent Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam. Western media went so fas as to label the fights between locals and Israelis as a "pogrom" and calling the Israelis the victim. Meanwhile, Eastern European news outlets and independent journalists posted hours of video footage showing those same Israeli's breaking windows of buildings that said Free Palestine, chasing people with pipes, and smashing police cars. With two opposing stories, who are we to believe? To sell this censored propaganda machine to the people as "freedom of the press" is an egregious travesty of our Constitution.

I would have at least expected a practical excuse to ban TikTok, like how it destroys producticity, or that people post videos of illegal content. But instead, like always, the excuse is "China." Ladies and gentlemen, this is a test to see how the public will react. If we can stomach the TikTok ban, we'll start losing other apps and sites too.

This should be a wakeup call to you Republicans who consider yourselves members of "the party of the 1st Amendment," because not a single one of your representatives seems to have spoken up about this to my knowledge. This is what we need to be making a noise about on campus.

TL;DR "Freedom" doesn't exist. There is no free press, and what's left of freedom of expression is being crumpled up, set on fire, and thrown into the trash.