On April 24, after years of talks over a TikTok ban, President Joe Biden pledged to reshape the platform's presence in the United States. The foreign aid package, which the president signed into law and passed with overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, included financial aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Gaza Strip, as well as a bill that would force the digital platform to sell to a U.S. company or be banned at the national level. TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has been given about nine months to make the sale. While President Biden did not directly mention the social media platform in his remarks after signing the package, he said foreign aid “makes America safer,” a notion that also helps explain the government's reasoning for banning TikTok.
Over the past few years, TikTok has become something of a symbol of both fears about China’s rise as a dominant international power and concerns that social media in general is harming children. The existential threat posed by the new law is nothing new. In 2020, the company laid out an elaborate plan to give away 20% of its platform to Walmart and Oracle, which would have theoretically guaranteed data security and the company’s independence from the Chinese government. The plan was ultimately shelved in 2021 due to security concerns. But since then, the platform has become increasingly popular among U.S. users, and the company has been trying to turn them into activists. Earlier this year, when U.S. users opened the app, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to “tell Congress what TikTok means to you,” along with a button to call elected officials directly. The wave of angry and ignorant phone calls that followed may have actually prompted lawmakers to act on the proposed ban, as lawmakers’ offices told Politico. According to Politico, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers concluded that the calls “only exposed the extent to which TikTok can manipulate and target its messaging” — in other words, by trying to rally supporters, the company has proven itself a propaganda threat.
TikTok CEO Shaw Zi Chiu has become something of a Gen Z-approved celebrity since joining Congress in 2023. On the day Biden signed the new package, Chiu made the company's position clear in a slick TikTok video posted to his official account. The law is a “ban on you and your voice,” Chiu said. He added that “TikTok gives ordinary Americans a powerful tool to be seen and heard.” Chiu's statement hints at what appears to be a legal strategy ByteDance will employ going forward: the argument that banning TikTok could be an infringement of free speech. On Tuesday, the company sued the U.S. government, saying in a filing that it would be “unconstitutional” to prevent U.S. citizens from accessing the app. There are legal precedents for such arguments, including the 2017 Supreme Court case of Buckingham v. North Carolina, which struck down a state law banning sex offenders from Facebook. “A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that everyone has access to a place where they can speak and be heard,” former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. “One of the most important places for the exchange of ideas is cyberspace, and social media in particular.”
But other hints from ByteDance about how it will respond to the new law make the company’s position less enthusiastic about the First Amendment. Reuters reports that ByteDance would rather shut down its TikTok operations in the U.S. than sell them. The vaunted recommendation algorithm that controls TikTok’s “For You” feed is what makes the app unique and successful. ByteDance leverages the same technology in many of its other businesses, including Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. As with any international trade dispute, putting valuable technology in the hands of a competitor through a sale would be destabilizing. Meanwhile, TikTok’s U.S. users reportedly generate only about 13% of ByteDance’s 2023 revenue. In that sense, abandoning the U.S. market is strategically favorable and relatively trivial for ByteDance. TikTok has already been banned outright in several countries, including India, but has survived without issue. (China has also blocked access to TikTok, not to mention Facebook and Instagram, as part of its own techno-nationalism strategy.)
TikTok’s algorithm is inseparable from the app and also seems to be what we fear most. In political speeches and in some media headlines, the algorithm is portrayed as conveying Chinese propaganda to unsuspecting American teenagers and allowing foreign governments to closely track the actions of U.S. citizens. Unfortunately, propaganda, misinformation, and international bot activity are already found on all other social platforms in great volume, and a ban on TikTok would still leave Americans easily accessible. Data generated anywhere on the internet, as long as it can be tracked, can be packaged and sold to foreign (or domestic) enemies. While parents worry about their children’s TikTok addiction, two U.S. products, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, aim to entice people in the same way. TikTok provided a template for the future of algorithmically passive social media consumption, which other tech companies quickly copied. TikTok can be banned in the U.S., but it’s too late to contain the habits it has inspired. The U.S. ban makes the most sense as a political ploy. Belligerent action against China is popular across the political spectrum, and the people who are most vocally outraged by the threat of a ban are those not old enough to vote.
The interesting thing about TikTok is that, despite being so often featured in the news and in discussions about social media, many of the people involved barely know anything about it. According to a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center, only 33% of American adults said they have “used” TikTok. In contrast, 83% said they used YouTube and 68% said they used Facebook. The survey also showed that TikTok's user base skews heavily toward younger people. 62% of 18-29 year olds said they have used TikTok, compared to 10% of those 65 and older. Another estimate shows that more than two-thirds of TikTok's monthly active users in the U.S. are under the age of 35. Most millennials I meet rarely open the app and confess to not really knowing what it is or how it works, due in part to its entrenched reputation as an app for young people. Admitting to using the app, as I do, can sometimes feel like saying you watch Saturday morning cartoons.
This ignorance about TikTok reinforces its demonization, making it easier to blame the app for the collective ills of social media than other apps where Americans already spend a lot of time. TikTok's appeal is its feed, which draws users into a never-ending parade of content, seemingly reading their minds about what they want to see next. Most of what's addictive about the app is the kind of mundane internet content that's now everywhere: outrageous monologues, identically choreographed moves, America's Funniest Home Videos-level stunts, and random shopping recommendations. (That last genre spread quickly across the platform as executives realized that e-commerce might be more lucrative than advertising.)
TikTok is not magic. It is not a digital version of a nuclear bomb that one country controls at the risk of exposing other countries. If we want to understand its real risks, we had better unravel the motivation behind the US ban. The direct impact of the Chinese government could be mitigated somewhat by separating the app from ByteDance or banning it from functioning in the US, if that is a path the parent company is actually willing to take. But if the underlying concern is the surveillance of digital data and the targeting of individual users in ways that could manipulate or endanger them, then the domestic threat needs to be confronted first.♦