I heard the grumbling early Sunday morning, eight hours after TikTok shut down its U.S. operations. Twelve-year-old Connor wasn’t particularly bothered by the loss of TikTok, but he was mightily frustrated by the loss of CapCut.
Welcome to the law of unintended consequences, when a seemingly good idea goes off the rails because we didn’t think it through. Let’s back this up a bit for some context.
Good idea: Ban TikTok, one of the world’s most popular social media platforms, because it’s owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. There’s plenty of reason to believe the Chinese government uses its algorithms to influence how Americans perceive news and information and it’s a threat to national security. So much so that then-President Donald Trump in August 2020 issued an executive order saying TikTok should be shut down in the U.S.
Fast forward four years and a bipartisan Congress passed the ByteDance “ban-or-sell” legislation. Then-President Joe Biden signed it in April 2024. On Jan. 17, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law and over the weekend TikTok (briefly) went dark.
The unintended consequence: ByteDance also owns CapCut, editing software that makes it easy for content creators to manage short videos. CapCut disappeared along with TikTok (albeit briefly, too). There are alternatives to CapCut, but most aren’t as user friendly. My grandson uses CapCut.
TikTok and CapCut are back online temporarily and there’ll be complicated legal and political machinations to come. Though you may never have a need for TikTok, much less CapCut, the ByteDance saga is a decent example of unintended consequences. Who knew national security concerns could create consternation for a 12-year-old content creator?
TikTok and trees | Unintended consequences
Back here on the island, Key West has three unintended consequences brewing. One (trees) seems to have a solution; a second (e-bikes) perhaps not so much; a third (bonds) is going to be a wait-and-see.
Let’s start with e-bikes. Mary, Joseph and the Wee Donkey, those things can move. Here I am tooling along at 20 mph in my car on North Roosevelt and e-bikes are whizzing past me on the promenade. You rarely see casual walkers along the promenades anymore. It’s not safe, especially on the south side with all its curb cuts.
It makes perfect sense to slow them down. If you’re a purist, you’ll side with the ban-the-bikes crowd. Key West already bans e-bikes on city sidewalks, but we can’t ban them on the promenades because the state controls those and the state says no bans allowed. The only way Key West can get e-bikes off the North Roosevelt promenades is to petition the State of Florida to change its law. That’s going to be a tough sell, I suspect, but probably worth a shot.
Here comes the unintended consequence: Let’s assume the state legislators agree and e-bikes are banished to the roadways. What happens when hundreds of e-bikers making their ways to and from work dump into four lanes of traffic? What happens to my mobility-impaired friends whose only transportation is an e-bike — and who are terrified, justifiably so, to even think about joining the North Roosevelt vehicle racetrack? Do they get a handicapped sticker allowing them on the promenade?
Next up, those multimillion-dollar bonds Key West voters approved last August. Instead of major capital projects being approved one by one by voters, city commissioners can now, with a supermajority vote, decide how to spend the money without voter approval. It’s easier to get things done quickly (good intention) with that blank check from voters, and maybe we’ll all be delighted with how the commission spends our money, but I’m not convinced. There’s still that proposal to tear down and rebuild a bigger amphitheater lurking around. We’ll have to see how this plays out to understand the unintended consequences of this new bond-spending efficiency.
And now for trees. Back in 2019 the state made it easy for homeowners to take down trees they felt were hazardous to their property or to people (good intent). Unfortunately, people being people, some homeowners in cahoots with disreputable tree cutters warped the law to their own ends. Local tree commissions, like Key West’s, could do nothing to curb the destruction. So, in 2022, the state amended the law to allow local governments to require both an International Association of Arborists’ hazard certification and an official tree-risk assessment, making it much harder to exploit the state law.
As of Jan. 7, Key West has its own ordinance requiring the certification and the assessment. It’s taken a while to get this done, but the unintended consequence of unscrupulous folks taking advantage of a loophole has been halted.
What is it they say? No good deed goes unpunished? The law of unintended consequences. But sometimes we can fix what we broke. Just ask the trees.
Learn more
U.S. Supreme Court decision on TikTok
How the TikTok decision affects CapCut
Key West Tree Commission: Four ways to strengthen the tree canopy
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