Having recently watched the new Mean Girls movie, the classic “stop trying to make fetch happen” line—said by main mean girl Regina George to a friend intent on injecting new slang into their lexicon—looms fresh in my mind. So that’s the first thing I thought when I heard about yet another attempt to ban TikTok. At this point, attempts to ban TikTok are nearly as stale as Mean Girls references.
Politicians won’t stop trying to make a TikTok ban happen, however.
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We went here with Trump, who tried to ban TikTok via executive order in 2020. (The courts said no, and the Biden administration rescinded the order.) We went here with Montana, which passed a TikTok-banning law last year. (The court said no, at least preliminarily, though Montana is appealing.) We went here with multiple bills, including one in 2022 from Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and one in 2023 from Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. (Both broad-reaching messes, and neither bill went anywhere after being introduced.)
Now, here we are again, with a bipartisan bill from Reps….
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