It's a hypothetical. Hypothetically suppose we all agree that TikTok usage should be reduced. You are a state legislator. What do you do?

Make using it a criminal offense with minimum mandatory sentence of 5 years in prison.

I would like to make the modest proposal that a more effective way of reducing usage would be to make it punishable by summary execution.

Oh no. The US isn't some kind of totalitarian country to do summary executions for petty crimes.

Why waste the free labor?

Let's punish every act that we don't want to see with death (or, at a minimum, cutting off a hand), that will solve world's problems for sure.

In that hypothetical I identify the federal policy I think would be effective and vote for the US rep, Senate and presidential candidates I think are most likely to enact that policy. As a state legislature I probably have some sway with my constituents, so I also publicly endorse that policy and candidates.

What I’m getting at is this isn’t an issue for the state level.

Sometimes people say "you only hate TikTok because it's a foreign company doing it better than American social media". Maybe that's right, maybe TikTok is just doing it better than American social media platforms, but what have we been saying about American social media for the last decade? (generally not positive things)

Maybe at some point this was all going to hit some kind of threshold where it is just no longer reasonable to call the effects of social media a net good. Maybe TikTok has passed that threshold. We can give them a trophy for that, but then plan some ways to finally restrict social media's addictive and anxiety-provoking qualities.

So restrictions on infinite scroll, or require the user to actually press a button before the next video starts. I'm sure there are a lot of ideas, and people more qualified than me to suggest them, but I think these two alone would be reasonable restrictions.

It disturbs me that TikTok being a Chinese company is being used right now as an excuse as to why these social media platforms shouldn't be made to change their deliberately addictive designs.

In a free market a ban should be enough for competitors and replacements to arise

That assumes zero barriers to entry. Social media apps are pure network effect, making them the opposite of free market. You can't compete directly with TikTok without quickly matching its userbase and content volume.

Well, in a free market there’s no ban. Is the reason for the ban “dur dur China?”, or performative political theater?

Montanas politics are such that they you can’t find an OB to deliver a baby anymore, so any “free market” competitor needs to consider what random event will put them out of business.

Is it a free market if such a ban exists in the first place?

Yep. Free markets don’t mean unlimited power to corporations.

Free markets only exist in econ textbooks. It would be more productive to discuss actually-existing markets.

> If it's because of China, then ban TikTok and subsidize a competitor app - but be serious about it. Be ready to spend hundreds of .....

Domestic competitors have already published their equivalents though, no subsidied required. It's not a very complicated app - they had clones up in months. Most popular Tik-Tokers already repost their content on these anyways.

Why do we need to subsidize naything? This already exists.

> Why do we need to subsidize naything? This already exists.

Because the problem presented here is: government bans TikTok, teenagers become experts at using VPN apps to work around the ban.

Social media apps live on network effects - it's near-impossible to compete with a well-established giant directly. But this also means that, if you manage to pull a critical mass of users over from your direct competitor, most of the rest will quickly switch too.

Therefore, the solution to teenagers overcoming the ban with VPN is to prop up a domestic competitor fast - pump money into it until it becomes more attractive to the kids than jumping through VPN hoops to get to TikTok. Once you get there, the problem solves itself.

(This is ofc. only for the scenario where the problem is China, not TikTok-style social media.)

Your argument rests heavily on "teens WILL overwhelmingly become VPN experts"

I don't understand why it can't instead be: banning will make domestic alternatives more attractive since now you don't even need a VPN to access it.

Sure some teens will use a VPN and continue to use TikTok, but I'm not sure it'll be to such an extent that we'd be forced to concede that banning was the wrong call.

Also you can do both: ban and subsidize.

> Your argument rests heavily on "teens WILL overwhelmingly become VPN experts"

My argument rests on "social media is sticky due to network effects".

Which is why "banning will make domestic alternatives more attractive since now you don't even need a VPN to access it" if and only if the domestic alternatives are so good in comparison to figuring out VPN, that a critical mass of domestic users switch over. Ban alone won't make it happen - TikTok is too sticky for that.

Those are teenagers we're talking about. They're resourceful, motivated, have infinite free time - learning how to use a VPN app will be trivial for them, especially that "VPN" here doesn't mean Wireguard or ISO/OSI hokus pocus, but rather a turnkey app that requires about three clicks to make your US Internet connection look like it's coming out of Somalia. It's not hard for them - and will be even easier if a ban on TikTok makes VPN companies target the teenager market directly.

> Also you can do both: ban and subsidize.

That's exactly what I recommended.

OK, you've changed my mind and I've updated more towards "banning alone is likely to be net negative to our goals if we don't also subsidize alternatives"

I think given I don't use TikTok at all I am bad at intuiting how powerful its network stickiness is.

Somehow I'm skeptical of your scenario where teenagers flock to government-sponsored social media.

It's not "government sponsored" as in Official Propaganda Arm of the United States, but rather "government sponsored" as in every other thing in your life, such as water, electricity, telecommunications, roads, policing, healthcare, ...

That doesn't change a thing -- it's not in keeping with the ordinary practices of the US, nobody wants it, and it's almost guaranteed to fail.

That's really ignoring the network effect that you're claiming to be dealing with.

As said, you don't subsidize the app creation or use. The apps already exist. The users know roughly how to use them.

The solution would be to take the X biggest content creators and pay them Y Million dollars each to stop posting on tiktok, and start posting on the competitors. Everyone else will follow.