TikTok: Free Speech or Security Threat?
Cato Podcast
Cato Institute
4.6 • 949 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
Cato’s Jennifer Huddleston and Tommy Berry examine the 2024 TikTok divest-or-ban law and what it means for Americans. They explain how the law could reshape the app market, restrict free speech, and expand government power far beyond TikTok itself.
Jennifer Huddleston, “Could the Latest TikTok ‘Ban’ Pass Constitutional Muster?,” Cato at Liberty (blog) (March 12, 2024)
Jennifer Huddleston, “Competition and Content Moderation: How Section 230 Enables Increased Tech Marketplace Entry,” Policy Analysis no. 922 (January 31, 2022)
Jennifer Huddleston and Tommy Berry, “TikTok Users Await Looming US Ban; SCOTUS May Intervene,” Cato Daily Podcast (January 16, 2025)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Tommy Berry, Cato's Director of Constitutional Studies. |
| 0:08.2 | And I'm Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy here at Cato. |
| 0:12.3 | And today we're talking about what's up with TikTok. How did we get here? Where are we now? And where are we going? |
| 0:19.4 | Yeah, it's hard to believe. It's been over a year now that this |
| 0:23.2 | has really been a dominating news story. And I think a lot of Americans find this a very popular |
| 0:28.9 | app. It's an issue that a lot of people, I think, felt very personally and had strong feelings |
| 0:34.4 | bad on both sides, whether they thought TikTok was potentially harmful, was too closely tied to China, or whether they were really worried about their favorite app going away. |
| 0:44.8 | One of the things we have to remember in this conversation, though, is while a lot of it has focused on TikTok, the actual underlying bill is much bigger than TikTok. |
| 0:53.8 | So as we'll talk about a lot of the focus, a lot of the conversations, a lot of the policy we've seen in the Trump administration since January has been focused on this one particular app. |
| 1:05.4 | But when we're thinking about this debate, we have to think about more than just what happens to TikTok. |
| 1:10.0 | The underlying elements of |
| 1:11.8 | this law could allow a lot of government intervention into the app market in general and into the |
| 1:18.3 | rights of what platforms Americans can or cannot speak on if the government decides that those |
| 1:24.3 | platforms could pose a national security risk by the definition it chooses. |
| 1:29.8 | Yeah, that's a great point. And so often people overlook that and they think that, oh, I don't |
| 1:34.2 | need to be concerned about this speech restriction because that's not a platform I've ever used |
| 1:38.7 | or that's not a point of view I agree with. But so often we see once that camel's nose gets under |
| 1:43.3 | the tent, once that |
| 1:44.2 | precedent is set, it spreads in directions that you might not anticipate and might hit a lot |
| 1:48.8 | closer to home. Yeah, and if we go back to March of last year, when 2024, when this law was |
| 1:56.8 | initially debated and in the house and then was was added to one of the bills and ultimately |
| 2:05.3 | became law, while TikTok and ByteDance are expressly named in the law, it says that it could |
... |
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