Why Banning TikTok Could Violate the First Amendment
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss efforts by the U.S. government to rein in social media, including the latest attempt to ban TikTok. While Kang agrees that society should be more conscientious about how we, especially children, use social media, he argues that efforts to ban these apps also violate the First Amendment.
“Social media has become the public square, even if it is privately owned,” he says.
This episode was originally published in March, 2024.
This week’s reading:
- “The Misguided Attempt to Control Tiktok,” by Jay Caspian Kang
To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The right to receive propaganda or the right to receive any type of information that you want to make those types of decisions for yourself is part of free speech. |
| 0:09.3 | And so eliminating something based on the threat of propaganda, right, I think is a violation of the First Amendment. |
| 0:18.0 | That's my colleague, Jay Caspian King. |
| 0:21.2 | We spoke in March of this year as lawmakers began the process of banning TikTok in the U.S. |
| 0:27.7 | Jay argues that this is a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. |
| 0:32.2 | Even if he agrees that our use of social media should be interrogated. |
| 0:36.2 | With the app's future in question, we thought we'd revisit this conversation, which |
| 0:40.2 | also considers why social media companies are now steering clear of political content. |
| 0:45.4 | You're listening to The Political Scene. |
| 0:47.6 | I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. In your latest column, you wrote that we should resist a society in which every human interaction gets processed through an algorithm and broadcast out to a frequently nasty public. |
| 1:08.5 | I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what this resistance |
| 1:11.2 | to social media has looked like over the years and how it has evolved. Yeah, I mean, I think that |
| 1:17.5 | there's two levels of it. The first is happening on the sort of official government level, right, |
| 1:23.1 | where there have been all these attempts to regulate social media companies. And I think for, you know, almost the entirety of his reign as the CEO of Facebook, for example, now meta, |
| 1:35.1 | Mark Zuckerberg has been just routinely hauled in front of Congress. |
| 1:38.2 | I mean, you know, it's almost like a clock, right? |
| 1:40.7 | Like, there he is in front of Congress again. |
| 1:42.8 | And so those efforts have not really |
| 1:45.3 | yielded too much in the way of regulating social media. And there's some very good reasons for that, |
| 1:50.0 | right? Like, I'm not sure if the Congress or the government is really, should be doing any of this. |
| 1:54.8 | But on the individual level, I think that some of what inspired me to write about this and |
| 2:00.3 | this is actually, you know, something I write about quite a bit, is that I generally find it odd that there is so little resistance on a personal level, right? |
... |
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