Supporters of expanding the federal police state have found a new boogeyman to scare the people into surrendering their liberty: TikTok. The bill is being marketed as a way to protect Americans from foreign governments that use social media to spy on Americans.

The RESTRICT Act makes no mention of TikTok or ByteDance. The Chinese government is mentioned only once in the bill, when it is designated as a “foreign adversary” along with five other governments. What the bill does do is give the Secretary of Commerce power to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate … any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respect to any property” that the Secretary of Commerce determines “poses an undue or unacceptable risk” in a laundry list of areas. So the US could shut down an American social media company based on the Secretary of Commerce’s determination that a website, while not actually doing anything to weaken America, poses an unacceptable risk that it will?

The RESTRICT Act’s potential victims are sites like Rumble.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/04/ron-paul/the-restrict-act-restricts-more-than-tiktok/?