Tik Tok Ban= Violation of Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 19 Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The Fascist U.S. Govt wants to control your speech.

On November 20, 2023, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote in a joint letter to the CEO of TikTok that the platform was guilty of “stoking anti-Semitism, support, and sympathy for Hamas” after the October 7 attack on Israel. “This deluge of pro-Hamas content is driving hateful anti-Semitic rhetoric and violent protests on campuses across the country,” McMorris Rodgers charged. A year ago, in March 2023, she had already declared: “TikTok should be banned in the United States of America.”

This week the plan came to fruition, with McMorris Rodgers and her colleagues orchestrating what could be best described as a legislative sneak attack: suddenly the House of Representatives, a notoriously dysfunctional body — particularly this Congressional term, with all the Republican leadership turmoil — took decisive, concerted, expedited action to pass legislation banning TikTok before most of the public would have even gotten a chance to notice. The bill was introduced March 5, 2024, advanced by a unanimous committee vote on March 7, 2024, then approved for final passage March 13, 2024. Almost nothing ever passes Congress at such warp-speed.

McMorris Rodgers facilitated the unanimous 50-0 vote out of the Energy and Commerce committee, a development which took many in DC off-guard, even those keenly attuned to the TikTok policy issue. As someone familiar with the process explained to me, before introducing the bill, the key sponsors “wanted to keep it quiet all around,” as they correctly surmised that once the details of the bill gained wider public exposure, opposition would mount — just as happened in March 2023 when a precursor bill got derailed after public awareness grew of provisions delegating enormous new powers to the President to control speech online.

This week, last-minute opposition continued to grow even during the final floor debate Wednesday morning, thanks to the quick-thinking of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who organized the opposition and later reported that the number of Republican House members voting no may have tripled as a result of the 40-minute floor debate he triggered — a rarity in the annals of Congress.

Republican opposition was still paltry though — just 15 voted no, compared with 50 Democrats. Even among the few no votes, some, like Matt Gaetz, made sure to clarify that on principle he was totally in favor of banning TikTok — he just objected to the particulars of this bill. The fact that Trump tentatively came out against the bill would also likely have been a factor for Gaetz, who likely would not have been so keen to stake out a different position from Trump on a major national policy issue. Whatever his precise stance, Trump has evidently not taken a major lobbying interest, as he has before with other legislative items. The little he’s said about the TikTok bill has been lukewarm and muddled — which makes sense given that it was Trump who first attempted to ban TikTok by executive fiat in 2020, and got held up by the courts. This current bill enumerates the powers Trump had unsuccessfully sought and codifies them in federal statute as a newly-assigned, discretionary presidential authority.