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The challenge

“TikTok is harmless fun”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No, it's not harmless. But the answer is to fix it, not flee it. The danger was always the owner. TikTok was built by ByteDance, a Chinese company, and China's twenty seventeen intelligence law requires companies to cooperate with state intelligence work. In twenty twenty-two ByteDance admitted employees improperly accessed journalists' data. That's why Congress passed a sell-or-ban law, and the Supreme Court upheld it unanimously. The fix is American ownership, not deleting the app. That's where your generation is, and I'd rather conservatives show up there than surrender the room. Then there's your brain. The Surgeon General warned that teens on social media more than three hours a day face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. You'll say Instagram hooks kids too. It does. Here's the test. Check your screen time tonight and say the number out loud. The dance is harmless. The algorithm has a boss.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The company that built TikTok operates under a legal system that can compel it to help the government's intelligence services.

    Article seven of China's 2017 National Intelligence Law requires organizations and citizens to support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work.

  2. The data risk isn't hypothetical. Congress and the Supreme Court took it seriously, and the remedy they chose was a sale, with a ban only as the backstop.

    In 2022 ByteDance acknowledged that employees improperly accessed the data of journalists; in 2024 Congress passed a law requiring divestment or a ban, which the Supreme Court upheld unanimously in TikTok v. Garland in January 2025.

  3. Endless short-video feeds carry real mental health risks for teenagers, whoever owns the app.

    The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory reported that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat collect data and hook kids too, so singling out TikTok is just politics.

Nate: The other apps have real problems, and parents should watch those too. But only one was built by a company under a law requiring cooperation with a foreign government's intelligence services. Same addiction problem, plus a second one the others never had. Fix the ownership, keep the platform, and put a clock on your own scrolling.

The lines

Sources

  1. People's Republic of China, National Intelligence Law (2017)
  2. Forbes, Reporting on ByteDance's internal investigation into employee access of journalists' TikTok data (2022)
  3. Supreme Court of the United States, TikTok Inc. v. Garland (2025)
  4. U.S. Surgeon General, Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory (2023)

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