Is banning Tiktok “un-American?”

Since the last time we discussed the efforts to ban Tiktok, we’ve been hearing more about future legal challenges to these restrictions and the international impact they would have.
So to get some different perspectives on Tiktok’s actual security risks and the courtroom sagas already shaping up, we talked with Timothy Edgar and Anupam Chander. Timothy is a professor at both Harvard and Brown, specializing in cybersecurity, and Anupam is a law professor at Georgetown who focuses on global regulation of new technologies. Both experts emphasized how banning Tiktok opens up a lot of new questions about how tech companies, specifically social media platforms, are treated in the U.S. and other countries. Because, while other countries including China and India have banned certain apps in the past, an American ban on Tiktok would send an entirely new message about how we do—or don’t—want to communicate with the rest of the world.

Since the last time we discussed the efforts to ban Tiktok, we’ve been hearing more about future legal challenges to these restrictions and the international impact they would have.

So to get some different perspectives on Tiktok’s actual security risks and the courtroom sagas already shaping up, we talked with Timothy Edgar and Anupam Chander. Timothy is a professor at both Harvard and Brown, specializing in cybersecurity, and Anupam is a law professor at Georgetown who focuses on global regulation of new technologies. Both experts emphasized how banning Tiktok opens up a lot of new questions about how tech companies, specifically social media platforms, are treated in the U.S. and other countries. Because, while other countries including China and India have banned certain apps in the past, an American ban on Tiktok would send an entirely new message about how we do—or don’t—want to communicate with the rest of the world.