Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“Justifying the law to block Americans’ access to TikTok, the government says ‘national security’ is threatened by the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that claims 170 million American users. A bigger threat, however, is the incessant use of that phrase to impart spurious urgency to agendas that are only tangentially, if at all, related to the nation’s safety. Linguistic inflation transforms too many things into ‘national security’ threats. … Granted, any company beholden to China’s Leninist party-state will do what the Communist Party dictates. But labeling speech (often accurately, regarding TikTok) as foreign propaganda does not license government interference with it. In 1965, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a law that burdened citizens’ ‘right to receive’ communist propaganda mailed from a foreign adversary. … The TikTok law asks us to trust the government that evidently thinks we cannot be trusted to cope with propaganda.” (09/11/24)