Lawmakers Hope TikTok Is Just The Start Of Push To Rein In Social Media Harms

WASHINGTON — Congress has just sent a bill to President Joe Biden’s desk that would ban the popular video-sharing app TikTok unless it divests from its Chinese parent company.

The legislation is a shocking crackdown on a social media business, but it comes as lawmakers dawdle on whether to rein in the broader industry or protect Americans’ digital privacy.

“It can’t just be about TikTok,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told HuffPost. “TikTok is the worst of these social media sites in terms of damage it can do, but Instagram does damage, YouTube does damage.”

Murphy is the co-author of a bipartisan bill, with Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), that would outlaw social media accounts for children under 13 and require parental consent for kids under 18.

It’s one of several proposals to create new standards for online safety and digital privacy that’ve been sitting on a shelf as the TikTok ban sailed through the House and Senate with surprising speed.

Murphy has previously worked on bipartisan deals responding to high-profile national problems, most notably with gun control in 2022. He and other lawmakers blame apps for higher suicide rates among young people and the proliferation of child sexual abuse material .

“Social media is just as dangerous as cigarettes, if not more dangerous, and the fact that parents realize that but government doesn’t is part of what drives the illegitimacy of government,” Murphy said.

Four years ago Congress raised the age for purchasing cigarettes from 18 to 21, a major no-brainer. But recently, after back-to-back mass shootings by teenagers in 2022, Murphy was unable to convince Republicans to do the same for the gun-buying age. So if regulating