Biden is literally running part of his campaign on TikTok. He must mean he'd ban it AFTER he gets reelected.
Discussion
Just the idea that the federal gov’t would pick and choose which consumer software products you’re allowed to use… total clown show
Putting aside the fact the decision of whether that's a good idea or not for just a moment, and the issue of enforcement too, it seems like that'd be a really difficult thing to defend legally.
The argument in the 90s was that because the federal government had the authority to control the exportation of munitions, that they could restrict the export of PGP sorftware, in both source and binary form.
That was struck down under the 1st amendment. And because the bill of rights is defined as forbidding the federal government from violating rights such as free speech, that prohibition also applies to violating the free speech of non-citizens. Ergo, they shouldn't be aable to ban the import of books, even if those books had the source code to TikTok.
So it seems like you'd have to do some serious mental gymnastics to figure out some way to justify that they have the authority to ban an app or service. It's not even a philosophical difference, it's a matter of well established case law.
Also, it'd be unenforcable and unamerican to do so. So yeah, there's that too.
I don’t disagree… but look around. The feds are well capable of mental gymnastics, and more and more they just declare some type of “emergency” to bypass due process