In April, President Joe Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a measure that could effectively ban the video-sharing app TikTok in the United States.
The bill, passed as part of a military aid package, is set up as a protection against foreign adversaries, and gives the Beijing-based TikTok developer ByteDance nine months to sell the app or the ban will be triggered.
For high school students like myself, such a ban would severely limit our rights to free speech and expression.
Lawmakers should not overlook the huge number of young people on TikTok, with two-thirds of teenagers and 56% of younger adults in the U.S. reporting that they regularly use the platform.
Many of us rely on the app for news, activism and entertainment. “My friends and classmates use TikTok daily,” Aruja Misra, a high school sophomore from El Paso, Texas, tells me. “If it’s banned, we would have less visibility of the world.”
TikTok is also used for a variety of different educational purposes. In my school’s classrooms, we use the app to learn about topics ranging from science to history through short-form videos that allow us to digest the information more efficiently. We also often create engaging video skits on the app for school presentations.
Perhaps most importantly, TikTok allows us to become more aware of places and issues we wouldn’t know about otherwise. In recent months, videos documenting human rights violations in countries like Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been dominating the hashtags and views across the app. As a result, we can see and hear directly about atrocities happening across the world.
As concerned young people, we can empathize, raise awareness for and help people living in unthinkable conditions, and reject the dehumanization that is sometimes projected by many of the largest mainstream news outlets.
“Ever since TikTok became a more political platform in 2020, (we) have been more socially aware of American politics. It (is) being used as a form of assembly” explains Suleikha Hakim, a high school junior from Columbus, Ohio. “I believe it is much easier to go viral, sharing locations of protests and sharing your political ideologies on TikTok.”
While there are legitimate concerns that TikTok can also help facilitate the spread of misinformation, the app shouldn’t mainly be used as a source for news, but rather to spread new ideas and encourage users to further research the issues they come in contact with. The platform forces us to ask ourselves questions about the world by offering us varying viewpoints instead of simply pushing one narrative.
TikTok presents us with perspectives that differ from those in U.S. news media sources, many of which can foster dangerous stereotypes about people in the Global South. This is why amplifying diverse perspectives is so important and why banning platforms that widen our view of the world strips away our right to free speech.
Moreover, as a student living in Texas, a state that has committed itself to censoring our ability to learn with anti-Critical Race Theory legislation and book bans, apps like TikTok are more important now than ever. With so few diverse perspectives in our textbooks, classrooms and discussions at school, Gen Z turns to TikTok to view more complete and accurate accounts of historical events and their implications today.
As the next generation of workers, lawmakers and voters, we deserve to see these perspectives and create our own political and social viewpoints without being limited by attacks on our freedom of expression.
