While social media applications (e.g. Facebook or TikTok) provide valuable tools for social interactions and generate new business opportunities, they have generated concerns about their implications for national security, disinformation, and data privacy, amongst others. Governments have responded to such rising challenges by more closely scrutinizing and even cracking down on foreign-owned social media apps. We investigate the attitudes of American citizens toward government intervention to regulate foreign social media apps amidst heightened geopolitical and economic competition. We posit that concerns that the presence of foreign social media in the U.S. may enhance the app home country’s economic and political influence may be an important factor influencing individual attitudes toward foreign social media use. Accordingly, we expect national security and regime concerns, as well as considerations about the social media app’s disinformation potential and economic effects to influence individual support for government decisions to ban foreign social media. The results from a conjoint analysis conducted in November 2024 with 1,500 respondents corroborate our expectations: apps that pose low risks to U.S. military/intelligence or corporate interests, fully independent ones, and those from democratic regimes, with content moderation policies, or have job creation potentials are less likely to be targeted for bans. Privacy protection and reciprocity also matter. Sub-groups analysis (e.g., by partisan orientation or age) shows that the results are robust, pointing to a surprisingly strong “hidden consensus” about what to ban. We conclude that the trajectories of the liberal international economic order and the digital world order mirror each other.