The TikTok ban feels like something that only happens in repressive regimes. China’s “Great Firewall” has existed for decades, keeping practically all outside information from its people. All leading news sites are banned, as are Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram. In Hong Kong, China shut TikTok down completely as part of its systematic crackdown on the pro-democracy movement there.

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The French government banned TikTok in its territory of New Caledonia for two weeks in May 2024 after violent riots broke out after local elections, justifying the ban by saying TikTok was a vehicle for spreading “misinformation” fueled by “foreign countries and spread by rioters.” Sound familiar? That same month, the Israeli government shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel.

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Right after invading Ukraine, Russia blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, and all major foreign news outlets, and the Indian government has used its Foreign Contribution Regulation Act – a law that is supposed to regulate the amount of foreign money that can enter the country – to silence civil society in multiple ways in India. 

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If these examples aren’t a bad sign, then we don’t know what is. And don’t forget, the United States already tried something like this in 1952, when Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act to restrict the American public’s access to foreign speech – and now we look back at it, horrified.

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At first glance, the McCarran-Walter Act set immigration and citizenship guidelines for America. But it also contained provisions aimed at stopping “subversion,” and established new ideological grounds for excluding people from the country. These included anarchists, Communists, and people whose “activities” would be “prejudicial to the public security” and “prejudicial to the national defense.”

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Congress was forced to override the veto of President Harry Truman to pass the law, who believed the legislation was a form of thought control, a “mockery of the Bill of Rights,” and a “long step toward totalitarianism.”

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President Truman warned that the law would “destroy all that we seek to preserve, if we sacrifice the liberties of our citizens,” and that “unwise or excessive security measures can strike at the freedom and dignity of the individual which are the very foundation of our society.”

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Boy was he ever right about that! The McCarran-Walter Act was eventually used to target a multitude of political and cultural figures. After Congress voted to fundamentally revise it in 1987, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) said, “I don’t think we have appreciated the hurt this legislation has done the United States over the years. It presented us as a fearful and subliterate and oppressive society.” Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), one of the chief sponsors of the revision, said it was “the worst law I’ve ever seen.”

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In the Supreme Court case United States v. Alvarez, Justice Kennedy said, “The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.”

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The bottom line is that suppressing speech is not an acceptable means of countering misinformation. Although concerns about fake news and distorted information are legitimate, the best way to fight propaganda is by countering it with truth, not censorship. Please believe us when we say this is not a thread we should pull on.