Resist the RESTRICT Act

All the big social media platforms harvest and monetize our data and incentivize other online businesses to do the same. TikTok raises particular concerns, given the surveillance and censorship practices of its home country, China. But it’s also used by hundreds of millions of people to express themselves online. The U.S. government has not justified silencing the speech of Americans who use TikTok. It can’t meet the high constitutional bar for a restriction on the platform, which would undermine millions of people’s free speech and association rights. The RESTRICT Act doesn’t require the executive branch to justify its restrictions on expressive technologies and severely limits lawsuits challenging the restrictions. Instead of passing this broad and overreaching bill, Congress should limit the opportunities for any company to collect massive amounts of our detailed personal data, which is then made available to data brokers, U.S. government agencies, and even foreign adversaries, China included. Congress should solve the problem of out-of-control privacy invasions by enacting comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation.