How a U.S. TikTok ban would censor trans people

On Wednesday, March 13, the U.S. House overwhelmingly voted to ban the social media app TikTok. The bill was presented as a bipartisan measure: TikTok’s shady ownership was potentially leaking sensitive user data to the Chinese government. The bill requires the aforementioned shady owners, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to either sell the app or face a ban in all U.S. app stores. 

Of course, in 2024, every social media platform has shady ownership. If you trust Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk further than you can throw them, I don’t know what to make of you. In fact, the unique and disproportionate fury facing TikTok has a very partisan and ideological basis: conservatives increasingly believe that TikTok is the platform the Chinese government is using to corrupt our children by spreading “woke” ideology and (of course) turning them all trans. 

The role of transphobia is, as always, more vocal and pronounced on the far-right. Political “detransitioner” Oli London told Breitbart News that China is “using TikTok to manipulate and weaken young minds with trans ideology,” and that “we didn’t really have [trans people] before TikTok came along.” (Christine Jorgensen, the first openly trans celebrity, came out in 1952.) Libs of TikTok— Chaya Raichik’s stochastic terrorism account, linked to everything from bomb threats at gender-affirming hospitals to the very recent death of Nex Benedict— is, of course, named after the platform.

However, more mainstream and respectable Republicans have also argued that TikTok is corrupting our youth, like Plato of old, and must therefore drink the hemlock of app-store bannings. Specifically, conservatives blame the app for widespread youth support of Palestine and criticism of the U.S. support for the war on Gaza. In November of last year, Dazed rounded up condemnations of the app from multiple high-profile Republican lawmakers, including Senator Marco Rubio, who alleged in a post on X that “TikTok is a tool China uses to spread propaganda to Americans, now it’s being used to downplay Hamas terrorism.”

First of all: There is no evidence that the Chinese government is performing surveillance or running disinformation campaigns via TikTok. Such disinformation campaigns do exist—for instance, Vladimir Putin’s effort to influence the 2016 presidential election—and social media platforms have knowingly or unknowingly participated in them. Facebook, for instance, leaked user data to the firm Cambridge Analytica, which then used that data to create “voter profiles” for the Trump campaign. Putin’s 2016 attempt ran largely through Twitter (though studies have found it had minimal influence on voters). For that matter, Donald Trump’s Twitter account, and specifically his repeated false claims that the 2020 election had been “stolen,” were arguably responsible for the January 6 insurrection waged in his name. 

You will note that neither Facebook nor Twitter were banned after these happenings. By aiming their guns at TikTok, conservatives have betrayed what they see as the proper role of social media platforms—not to convey information, but to tell people what to think. Here’s the thing: they already do. 

Elon Musk’s ownership of X is explicitly a political project, fuelled by hard-right sympathies, and reportedly spurred by his anger at his adult daughter’s transition. During his reign, hate speech and far-right accounts have thrived on the platform, and many queer and trans users have been driven off. Techno-crypto-fascist Marc Andreessen helped Musk to buy Twitter; he was also one of the early funders of Substack, which has also refused to moderate or demonetize anti-trans content and has its own growing Nazi problem. While Mark Zuckerberg’s sympathies remain purposefully enigmatic (he has made personal donations to both Republicans and centrist Democrats) the proliferation of misinformation on Facebook played a major role in Trump’s 2016 presidential victory—and, as a billionaire, we can reasonably assume that Zuckerberg is not interested in making it any less possible for billionaires to exist or to exert disproportionate political power. 

So what—in this context—makes TikTok such a problem? What makes hypothetical interference from China more of an emergency than proven interference from Russia, or from anywhere else? It’s not the privacy issues (though they undeniably exist, as they do with many other apps). It’s that the user base leans young. Because members of Gen Z are more likely to identify as queer or trans than members of previous generations, that means it also has a lot of queer and trans content, created by those young users. 

Though the U.S. government has yet to meaningfully regulate any of the social media giants, it has absolutely no problem with censoring the internet in order to punish marginalized groups. You can see this in KOSA, the Kid’s Online Safety Act, which could require sites to shut down queer and trans content on the grounds that it “endangers” minors. You can see it in FOSTA-SESTA, an “anti-trafficking” measure that made it harder for sex workers (a group that disproportionately includes trans women and trans people of colour) to safely screen clients online, and thereby pushed them into more dangerous street work. 

The war on TikTok is also being waged at a time when anti-trans pundits from Abigail Shrier to Jesse Singal have framed being trans as a “social contagion,” and kids who are suspected to be trans often have their internet access cut off by parents in order to prevent them from accessing support or information about transition. The anti-trans movement has been treating trans kids’ internet access as a crisis for well over a decade. By moving to ban TikTok, and its “wokeness,” Congress is validating that panic, and cooperating (not for the first time) in the ostracism and abuse of queer kids. 

None of this is to say that TikTok is safe or private, or that social media apps should not be regulated. They should, in fact, be regulated far more aggressively than they are now. For better or worse, social media is now how people get their news, and it plays an indispensable part in many people’s lives. Social platforms ought to be governed like public utilities, because that is more or less what they’ve become. Yet queer and trans kids learning about their identities, or making friends with one another, is not a problem. Letting billionaires buy and selectively manipulate our news is a problem, and a huge one, and there’s no plan to stop it. 

There is one Republican who has come out in support of TikTok—the one who called for the ban in the first place, Donald Trump. There are several potential reasons for this: Trump may be trying to pick up youth support. He may see the fact that young people disproportionately support Palestine and criticize Biden’s stance on the war, as a potential wedge issue. But the far more likely reason, as the New Republic reports, is that Trump recently met with Jeff Yass, a billionaire backer of his campaign who happens to own a 15 percent stake in TikTok. 

Whether TikTok is banned will not come down to the will of the American people, or privacy, or what is best for children or anything else. It will come down to which billionaire is using his access to warp the news, and whether he shares the biases of the people in power. For the rest of us, the news will be bad for the foreseeable future, no matter how this story unfolds.