Why Banning TikTok Will Only Make Youth More Cynical

Wise old-heads are always fighting against the cynicism of youth. As long as there are politics (both capital and lowercase “p”), this will always be a dynamic we have to fight against.

Often younger generations tend to default to a kind of “politicians are all the same” heuristic; that despite the specificities of ideology, policy and platforms, neither party really has their best interest at heart. Though they aren’t the only ones, young people end up rejecting direct political engagement, even towards the areas they care the most about. In the 2016 election (an election that anyone reading knows was one of the most important elections in American history), less than half of Americans 18 to 29 voted.

For the older and more experienced of us (regardless of what political ideologies we hold), we can see how this conflation (regardless of its merits) can be both contradictory and harmful. At this point in time, it would be hard to find a cogent argument that the Democratic and Republican are equivalent — on a range of issues (abortion, LGBTQ rights, gun control, housing, cost of higher education, the war in Gaza, etc.).

All that being said, the fact that Congress is getting ready to ban TikTok only exacerbates the notion that neither party has its priorities straight. President Biden signed a bi-partisan…