Many United States Congress members have been recently diving with gusto into a hatefest against social media website TikTok. Some of them are even supporting legislation that would ban the website in America and pose additional extreme threats to freedom.

Against this rush to ban a website and stomp on freedom, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) presented in a Tuesday editorial at the Louisville Courier Journal a multipronged argument against taking the authoritarian approach in this instance.

Banning TikTok, argues Paul, can turn Congress members into villains in the minds of many of the “94 million, primarily young Americans,” who use the website, set the course for banning additional websites — including US-based social media websites — that have similar attributes as those Congress members are disparaging at TikTok, and violate the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights that is “precisely there to protect speech that might be unpopular or might be controversial.”

Read Paul’s editorial here.

Reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.