Let’s see. Lawyers are split on this. The national security context is the strongest case. And as an American and a voter I support this 100%. In exceptional cases I support Congress banning companies especially if they happen to originate from hostile nations, us hedge fund investors be damned.

As an American, why don't you prefer allowing consumers to leverage their free will and just make clear what the risks of using TikTok are?

The government getting into the business of banning companies, and more specifically banning online services, is very, very dangerous in my opinion. This one move effectively creates the need for our own great firewall, starting with a list of only one service but with the executive power to grow that list as more "national security threats" are named.

Because governments recieve the mandate from the people to take up things like national security on information we are not privy to.

In this -- extreme case -- the exceptional case of banning the company I think is warranted.

Secondly, half the country voted for DJT. Some insignificant percentage believed his lies and doubted science and such during COVID. Mistakes were indeed made by governments and scientists and public trust in them was strained ... but it proved to me, at least, that the general US public is not educated enough or are just too hopped on their social media opium to care enough to really weigh the threat that TikTok plays. And in this case I defer to the intelligence community and those who operate in the area of national defense to handle this. Seems enough of congress and the senate agree with me.

If banning TikTok is a national security requirement then they should just ban TikTok rather than create a law that grants new peers to the government. I don't have the codes handy, but I'm 99% sure the powers are already in place for the government to have forced he ban of TikTok without new laws if national security was at risk.

I'm hesitant to assume people are uneducated because of who they vote for. Talking about Covid and the pandemic response, a vast majority of our politicians and health leaders were knowingly spouting off lies in the name of what they thought was best for us. Again, I can't pin that on any one person, even Fouci. The system broke down and that says nothing meaningful about the average voter.

That said, an educated populace is a fundamental need in a democracy and one that the US founders were well aware of. We don't have that today, whether by incompetence or malice our major societal systems reinforce obedience and subservience. We need more people following their curiosity wherever it leads, and we won't get there by continuing to further lean into a distrust of the general public or by making everyone's daily lives more and more complicated and stretched with less time to spend however each person wants to spend it.