National Security Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I rise today not in defense of TikTok but in defense of TikTok's users, especially the 170 million American users. Congress is rapidly heading towards passing legislation that will likely result in the blocking of the most popular application among young people in this country--an app whose fundamental purpose is to facilitate and promote speech; an app that has revolutionized how people connect, share, do business, and communicate online; an app that is bringing competition to the heavily concentrated social media market.

It should be a serious flag that a bill with such significant implications for freedom of speech and online competition has gone from being an idea in the House of Representatives to all of a sudden being passed on the floor of the Senate in a matter of weeks, just weeks.

So when political elites who otherwise fiercely disagree with each other come together to pass legislation that may result in significant censorship--yes, censorship--often in the name of national security, we should be hypervigilant about the true intentions of this legislation.

Episodes in history of using national security as a pretext to crack down on dissenting or unpopular speech loom as warnings about the ease of compromising our values when national security is supposedly at stake.

I want to be clear. I rise today on this greatest of debate floors not to defend TikTok. I don't deny that TikTok poses some national security risks. Instead, I come here today with a plea to my colleagues to think carefully about the impact of this bill, the consequences of its implementation, and the tradeoff between supposed national security threats and freedom of expression and basic rights to free speech.

This legislation may address or at least mitigate a national security risk, but it could and likely will result in widespread censorship. This censorship would predominantly impact young people in our country, many of whom are just gaining their political consciousness and obtaining the right to vote. We should be clear-eyed about these stakes.

Censorship is not who we are as a people. We should not downplay or deny this tradeoff. Some say the legislation merely forces ByteDance to sell TikTok within a year. That is a sale that won't affect its users at all. The ownership will change, so bill supporters say, but the app will stay the same.

Realistically, the actual chances of divestment in a year, if ever, are very small. A TikTok sale would be one of the most complicated and expensive transactions in history, requiring months, if not years, of due diligence by both government and business actors.

We should be very clear about the likely outcome of this law: It is really just a TikTok ban. And once we properly acknowledge that this bill is a TikTok ban, we can better see its impact on free expression: 170 million users--170 million Americans use TikTok to watch videos, learn about the news, run a business, and keep up with the latest pop culture trends. They connect with friends and family, sell new products and build community. The culture and expression on TikTok are unique and unavailable anywhere else on the internet.

In fact, TikTok is a threat to business, a threat to Facebook and Instagram and other American companies precisely because of its unique style and community which cannot be replicated anywhere else.

And while many of my colleagues are sincere in their fears for U.S. national security, others appear to support this legislation for a far more dangerous reason: They want to ban TikTok because of its users' content, because of TikTok's viewpoints. They don't like that many TikTok users support progressive or liberal politics or perspectives that they simply don't agree with.

The bill's supporters dress up this censorship by arguing that the Chinese Government is manipulating TikTok's algorithm to promote certain viewpoints. In this view, a TikTok ban is about combating Chinese propaganda, not penalizing TikTok's content.

TikTok, from their perspective, is ``poison[ing] the minds of young Americans with pro-Communist China propaganda.'' This isn't just some hypothetical risk, critics say, but an actual ongoing operation by the Chinese Communist Party.

Don't be fooled by these arguments. Although the Chinese Government certainly censors online speech in China, there is no credible evidence that the CCP has done so in the United States through TikTok. In fact, when U.S. national security officials talk about the risk of China manipulating TikTok's algorithm, they refer to it as a ``hypothetical'' risk--a hypothetical risk. This is the real objection, an objection to the political content, the most valuable and protected speech in a democracy.

We should be very clear about the impact and intent of this legislation. This bill is, for all intents and purposes, a ban on TikTok, and it is intended to suppress disfavored speech on the platform, plain and simple. We could see that in the cross- examination--the questioning in the House of Representatives hearing-- on this subject.

For my colleagues who are awake to this reality, they may, nevertheless, believe that such speech suppression is a small cost to pay to keep Americans safe. To them, I urge a strong note of caution. The defense that a little speech suppression is necessary when our national security is at stake is ultimately un-American. This reasoning may seem convincing, but American history has too many examples of controversial laws that ultimately infringe on civil liberties in the name of national security. In the United States, we often look back on these episodes with regret. We should not add TikTok to that history.

Don't get me wrong. TikTok has its problems. No. 1, TikTok poses a serious risk to the privacy and mental health of our young people. In fact, TikTok paid a fine for violating my Children's Online Privacy Protection Act just 5 years ago. But that problem isn't unique to TikTok, and it certainly doesn't justify a TikTok ban, which is what we heard over and over again in the House of Representatives in their hearing on this issue. The reason is that YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are making our children sick, as well, and exploiting our children and teenagers and their information for profit. American companies are doing the same thing, too, to children and teenagers in our country, as is TikTok.

So why aren't we thinking of this as a common goal that we are going to have in order to protect those teenagers and children?

If the bill's supporters truly wanted to protect the well-being of our young people, they would broaden their lens and address the youth mental health crisis plaguing our children and teenagers that has, in part, been caused by Big Tech in the United States--in the United States--along with TikTok.

I want you to hear the statistics. To my colleagues, it is powerful. One in three high school girls in the United States just 2 years ago considered suicide. At least 1 in 10 American high school teenage girls attempted suicide that year--attempted suicide. Amongst LGBTQ youth, the number is more like 1 in 5 attempted suicides just 2 years ago.

Now, it is not exclusively because of social media, what TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Discord--all of them are doing it, but it plays a big role according to our own Centers for Disease Control. It plays a big role according to our own Surgeon General. It plays a big role, and we should be talking about that out here. That is a clear and present danger. That is not a hypothetical danger. That is not a hypothetical threat that may occur sometime in the long, distant future. It is happening right now. If we are talking about TikTok, we should be talking about all the other companies at the same time.

Instead of suppressing speech on a single application, we should be addressing the root causes of the mental health crisis by targeting Big Tech's pernicious privacy invasion business model of teenagers and children in our country. We could be passing our bipartisan Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act and banning targeted ads to kids and teens on TikTok and everywhere else.

My legislation with Senator Bill Cassidy has been intensely vetted, passed through Senate committee, and is supported by the chair and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee. And unlike a TikTok ban, it addresses the problem that is universally recognized, the compromised health and well-being of all of our children and teenagers.

Today, if you hear out on the floor Senators talking about the impact TikTok is having upon young people in our country, it is a good question, and we should be dealing with it, but you can't deal with it just by talking about TikTok. You have to talk about every American company that actually created the model that has led to this mental health crisis, and we are not doing that today. That is something that is a clear and present danger right now, not a hypothetical threat in the future, which is what we are actually doing by passing this legislation.

Instead of protecting young people online, we are censoring their speech, and this is a grave mistake. We should be having a much bigger discussion about what the implications of this legislation are for the future. I thank the Presiding Officer for giving me the opportunity to come out here on the Senate floor to talk about this very important issue.

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