Banning TikTok or the first step to banning freedom of speech
It is 10:49 p.m. on January 18, 2025. TikTok has stopped working. Some people have sent me screenshots of their app telling them that TikTok is no longer available, but, for whatever reason, my app is letting me watch TikToks on my For You Page still. I cannot open comments, it tells me something went wrong. I cannot like videos or save anything to my favorites. My profile will not load either but I can still scroll — for the time being. Albeit, it goes slowly.
It makes it more haunting and confounding, the way it is undoing itself piece by piece, which seems eerily fitting as we lie in wait for what may come. The monitor beside the deathbed falls into a panic, the emaciated corpse of American freedom taking its dying breath. And we didn’t know — or perhaps we did. Perhaps we did not want to know and so we ignored it like we look away from things that we cannot bear to face. But now it is here, my TikTok profile gray rectangles that will not load as if I have been erased. I keep scrolling, for as long as I can, because maybe it is just a glitch. Instead, I am a phantom in a graveyard, something left behind. I am bearing witness to something I should not be allowed to see. I do get to the bottom, a point when the data would need to reload but cannot anymore. And that is the end.
It is odd, knowing that 170 million Americans are very suddenly unable to access a platform we have used and loved since 2016. I am twenty-five, I cannot remember a world without Wi-Fi or the internet. Access to everything is second nature. When the Wi-Fi goes out, I feel as if I have been blinded. I am my ability to connect to anyone and anything. At its core, this is freedom, much in the way opening a book or travelling to another country or going to school might be. The ability to explore is the freedom promised to us as American citizens, from which opinions and choices are borne, right or wrong, but they are ours to make.
The TikTok ban feels like a door being shut in my face and I cannot open it. I do not think you know what being helpless is until there is a door you cannot open. Everything is beyond it, if only you could turn the knob, but you cannot. They have made us helpless. We are spoiled, the entire universe is at our fingertips, until it is not.
I sit in my room mourning over an app and you can say it’s not that serious but it is. If they can take TikTok, a place people connect, express themselves, build businesses, and share perspectives, they can take anything. It is not about TikTok singularly but the precedent it sets for everything else.
When I was in middle school, I read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It has been a while and, writing this, I feel I should reread it as an adult. As an American, you grow up learning about World War II, the Holocaust, and the Nazis. It might be the only simple event in history, that almost everyone can agree on and be correct in their identification of it: the Nazis are bad. Though I suppose people are forgetting even that, but that exists as a discussion for another time.
There is a scene in The Book Thief, one of the scenes in literature that I will never forget reading regardless of time, where books are burned. It is common knowledge that the Nazis burned books during the Third Reich, we learn about it in school as one of the ways the party used its power to disenfranchise German citizens, stripping them of their ability to learn and thus formulate their own perspectives — perspectives that, if they could be had, would certainly challenge the irrationality of Nazi Germany. They did this because they were afraid of people being free and thus being able to choose, because they would certainly not choose them.
We can talk about it in history classes or read about it in historical fiction novels and marvel at how people allowed their government to take advantage of them in such a way that they were burning books in the streets and no one did a thing. The blatant disrespect for people’s autonomy is staggering, but not only our autonomy, the object that allows us to remember and be remembered. There are ideas that prevailed over centuries only because we were and still are allowed to express them freely. I can imagine it in my mind, that scene from The Book Thief, the destruction of ideas, the very thing that supposedly separates humanity from animals. The foundation of our being set aflame for the sake of power and control of the few. The heinous disregard for everyone and everything that came before us and everything that will come after.
Today they lit a proverbial fire but this is the same thing. They see a space where opinions are being shared and everyday citizens are redefining their beliefs and they are petrified. An inquisitive population is a threat to the hegemonic system in place and their power only exists because of it. So they take away the thing that enables us to connect and share, because that is what it always is, whether it be paper and ink or an app, and they let it burn. They tell you they are doing it for your safety, as the Nazis probably told the German citizens as pyres of burning books lit up the night, but they are doing it for themselves.
I am afraid and you should be too. For all intents and purposes, the American government is still an institution by the people and for the people. It is ours to say we are unhappy with and ours to change. I am just a woman in the Midwest but I know these are sentiments shared by most, if not all, Americans, devoid of political ideology. The government has never been in conflict, not in the way they want us to believe, only aspired to ensure that we the people remained divided, because they know this is our country, not theirs. We have just forgotten our own power until now, until they set it on fire. I hope students will not marvel over us in fifty years as they learn history and wonder why we did not do something.
