When you scroll on my TikTok For You page, you see Selena and Haley drama, vegetarian recipes, cats, comedy, and a lot of capybaras. That might not seem particularly threatening to you, but it sure does to governments across the world.
It seems like everyone is trying to ban TikTok.
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Why the U.S. wants to ban TikTok
TikTok was once an American app named Musical.ly(opens in a new tab), but Chinese tech company ByteDance bought it in 2017. During the early days of shelter-in-place regulations in the U.S., TikTok had a real moment — and the moment maintained itself. We saw people gain fame from viral dances and cooking videos, and we saw how the U.S. government would handle a nation obsessed with content driven by a foreign-owned tech company, too. In January 2019, the American think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics(opens in a new tab) investigated the social media platform and found that the app had the ability to send data to its parent company in China, ByteDance. Later in 2019, Senators Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Chuck Schumer asked the government to investigate the app.
Eventually presidents — including both Donald Trump and Joe Biden — looked into banning TikTok. A Trump-era executive order said TikTok's data collection(opens in a new tab) "threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information." The result of TikTok having this information and giving it to the Chinese government would, Trump said, pave the way for China to track the locations of government employees, conduct espionage, and build dossiers for blackmail.
Investigative journalist Emily Baker-White has uncovered some unsettling examples of ByteDance employees performing high-tech surveillance(opens in a new tab) on her and an associate(opens in a new tab), and shown that U.S. data supposedly quarantined in the U.S. was accessed from China(opens in a new tab). While these episodes are deeply troubling, to say they make TikTok, in the words of Marco Rubio(opens in a new tab), "a CCP-puppet company" strains plausibility.
Experts don't all agree, for instance, about the degree of the Chinese government's involvement. Georgetown University law professor Anupam Chander told NPR that the claims that TikTok(opens in a new tab) is sharing U.S. users' data — or using it for political gain — lacks a good deal of confirmation.
"There's no evidence of this," Chander said. "None of the claims here, even the insider claims that some employees make about access by people in China," Chander explained. "That access isn't by the Chinese government, but rather others within the Byte Dance corporate structure, to [look at] data about TikTok employees and others in the United States."
It is clear, however, that the app is threatening America's dominance over tech — just look at all the ways American-owned tech companies have been copying TikTok — including vying for ways to copy its enticing For You algorithm. As far as data goes, some lawmakers believe that TikTok is being used as a tool for the Chinese Communist Party to spy on Americans — which might be a bit of a stretch.
Moreover, some activist groups, such as the ACLU, say banning TikTok would violate the First Amendment(opens in a new tab).
What U.S. TikTok bans have looked like so far
A barrage of bills attempting to limit TikTok's reach because of the alleged data sharing became flooding U.S. lawmakers' desks in late 2019 — most of them poorly thought-out, ineffective and, in a word, doomed.
First came Senator Josh Hawley's National Security and Personal Data Protection Act(opens in a new tab) which would ban ByteDance from sending American's personal data to China. He also introduced a bill that would ban downloading the app on government devices, a proposal that would eventually stick. By the end of 2019, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army(opens in a new tab) banned TikTok from all government-issued devices. Then-President Donald Trump attempted — sloppily — to ban the app. In an August 2020 executive order, Trump said TikTok had 45 days to be sold to an American company or it would be banned. TikTok filed an injunction in response, and the ban stalled. Meanwhile, TikTok instated an American CEO, part of its non-stop effort to distance itself from China.
Then we reached the Biden era. Within the first few months of his presidency, Biden dropped all of Trump's attempted TikTok bans but still asked the government to review the app for security threats.
While the effort behind all those bans might seem aggressive, it didn't have much of an impact beyond political statements. Just because the app is banned on government devices doesn't mean people working in the government can't use the app — they just can't on their work phones. And schools like the University of Mississippi(opens in a new tab) that have banned the app on institutional wifi and devices, are just forcing students to use a different wifi connection or their cellular plan to access the app instead.
Furthermore, even the most effective ban imaginable would mean that ByteDance can't do business in the U.S., meaning Apple and Google couldn't host the platform on their app stores. But you'd still be able to consume TikTok videos; it would just be way harder. Picture someone in another country, or someone in the U.S., but with a VPN and some ingenuity, tweeting a TikTok video, and Americans watching it that way.
Is the U.S. actually going to ban TikTok?
Despite the relatively flimsy reasoning, legislation has not only not slowed, but it's gotten more serious. Beyond state-wide rulings to get TikTok off of government-owned devices and blocking its use on some university wifi systems, there are now bills in the House of Representatives and Senate. Both of these bills would hand authority to the executive branch to ban the app.
A bipartisan group of senators unveiled legislation called the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act(opens in a new tab). It would effectively allow the president to take action against any tech company with ties to China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela that "poses an undue or unacceptable risk" to national security. Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul introduced HR 1153(opens in a new tab) in the House, a bill that "mandates the administration to ban TikTok or any software applications that threaten U.S. national security(opens in a new tab)." TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is going to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee later this month, which might clear up some of the questions about data privacy.
So, long answer short: The U.S. wants to ban TikTok for political reasons, but is covering that up with a light screen of privacy concerns. It probably won't happen.
