On Wednesday, President Biden signed a bipartisan bill that could ultimately lead to a shutdown of TikTok. The new law is the culmination of increasingly frantic efforts by lawmakers to address security concerns about the Chinese-owned app. In the past year and a half, at least 33 U.S. states have limited the use of TikTok in some capacity. Bans have also been introduced in cities, government-affiliated workplaces, and college campuses.
The idea of a TikTok ban has roots in the Trump administration, but it’s become a bipartisan issue as more politicians ring the alarm about TikTok’s murky relationship with its parent company, ByteDance, and the Chinese government. While it may seem like overblown paranoia about a popular Gen-Z app that elderly lawmakers just don’t understand, some of their concerns are legitimate. Still, banning TikTok from app stores probably wouldn’t do much to keep American data safe. Here’s everything to know.
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Why ban TikTok?
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet company based in Beijing. Therefore, it’s subject to a series of security laws that allow the Chinese Communist Party to compel a company to hand over data. American lawmakers are worried that the Chinese government will pressure ByteDance to share U.S. data gathered on TikTok, which the CCP could potentially use to blackmail American journalists and politicians. There’s concern that the CCP can use TikTok’s algorithm — and whatever data they’ve gathered to model community behavior in the U.S. — to censor videos, disseminate misinformation, or otherwise influence the feeds of American citizens.
The idea of addressing these issues with a ban first came up in 2020, when then-President Trump tried to force ByteDance’s hand by proposing an ultimatum: ByteDance could sell the app to an American company, or it would be removed from U.S. app stores. At one point, the administration worked out a deal to sell TikTok to an American software company, Oracle, but the deal eventually fell through and Trump’s ban was struck down by a federal court. By the time Biden came to office, he rolled back Trump’s executive order and began private negotiations with TikTok and its parent company.
While it started mostly as a hot-button topic for conservative politicians, concerns about TikTok’s relationship with mainland China have reached Democrats too. Earlier in 2023, Colorado senator Michael Bennet wrote a letter urging Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. It’s not just policy-makers: FCC commissioner Brendan Carr and FBI director Christopher Wray have both expressed major security concerns about TikTok.
A small minority of lawmakers have spoken out against prospective TikTok bans, including New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, who’s likened the security concerns to a “red scare” and argued the panic is a result of Republican fearmongering and xenophobia.
Trump, meanwhile, seems to have reversed course this time around — last month, he expressed concern about a possible TikTok ban, writing on Truth Social that getting rid of TikTok might “double business” for Facebook, which he apparently does not want. He recently theorized that “Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” suggesting he plans to make this ban an election talking point.
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Where is TikTok banned?
College campuses, states, and even a few cities have “banned” TikTok in some capacity, though only in relation to their own devices and networks. At least 33 states have banned the app from state-owned devices and networks, and several dozen colleges and universities have made it unavailable on campus Wi-Fi networks. Cities including Charlotte, Baltimore, Denver, and New York City have prohibited local government employees from using the app on their work phones. In May, the governor of Montana tried to ban the app on personal devices statewide, but TikTok filed a lawsuit and a federal judge blocked the bill, arguing that it “oversteps state power” and “likely violates the First Amendment.” At the end of 2022, Biden signed off on a bill prohibiting TikTok usage on devices issued by the federal government. Still, as things stand right now, students and government employees — not to mention everyone else — can continue to use TikTok on their personal devices or networks.
In 2022, longtime anti-TikTok crusader Marco Rubio introduced a bipartisan bill that would empower Biden to block all U.S. transactions with TikTok and ByteDance. It’s similar to the language Trump used when he tried to ban TikTok in 2020 — though the specific “transactions” aren’t defined, it would probably bar Apple and Google from offering new downloads or updates in their app stores, eventually rendering the app unusable. Rubio’s bill failed to gain momentum, and since then, two other proposals, one led by Josh Hawley and another by Senator Mark Warner, have outlined similar policies. And then there’s the bill currently gaining momentum in Congress — the one that prompted the in-app message and that the House of Representatives approved this week — which would require TikTok to divest from ByteDance within six months or face being removed from app stores.
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Would a national ban even work?
Aynne Kokas, a media-studies professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in tech relations between the U.S. and China, says the probability that TikTok will manage to maneuver a divestment from ByteDance is “unlikely.”
Now that the legislation has made it past Biden’s desk, Kokas says, it will most likely have to be enforced by Google and Apple, who could make updating and downloading the app much more difficult. (Although, she pointed out, it’s not guaranteed that both companies would cooperate; Apple has a significant investment in the Chinese market.) The Montana bill is not the only ban that has faced legal challenges — Texas’s ordinance to take TikTok off state devices and networks was challenged by First Amendment lawyers but upheld by a federal judge.
There’s also a bigger problem: TikTok isn’t the only company wielding a massive amount of user data. TikTok’s algorithm isn’t any more opaque than Meta’s, Twitter’s, or Amazon’s, and it isn’t gathering much more data than what these American platforms mine from their users. While those platforms can’t be compelled to share that data with government officials, they can largely do whatever they want with it. “In the U.S., it’s quite a free-for-all in terms of what companies can gather and how they can use it,” Kokas said, adding that, by specifically targeting ByteDance, lawmakers “circumvent the much more politically thorny issue of how to regulate data-gathering in the U.S. more broadly.” Even as politicians rush to crack down on TikTok, regulations for domestic tech companies are noticeably lax. In fact, a TikTok ban is pretty ideal for Silicon Valley — it wouldn’t touch the companies’ own data-collection practices, and TikTok’s market share would be up for grabs.
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What does TikTok have to say about all this?
TikTok has repeatedly denied ever passing American user data along to the Chinese government. Representatives have admitted that the app used to occasionally censor videos. At a 2022 Senate hearing, TikTok’s interim chief operating officer, Vanessa Pappas, testified that the app doesn’t share data with the Chinese government but wouldn’t commit to cutting off Chinese employees’ access to American data.
But a lot of these issues hinge on TikTok’s relationship not with the Chinese government but with its Chinese parent company. There’s a fair amount of evidence suggesting ByteDance employees can access U.S. user data in some capacity. It also seems like TikTok’s algorithm is influenced by the Chinese government’s agenda — the app has been known to censor videos that talked about protests in Hong Kong, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
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Just how hostile have things gotten?
TikTok has been working with the Biden administration on and off to try and assure lawmakers that they’re keeping American TikTokers insulated from Chinese meddling. For the past two years, the company has been in confidential negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
In 2022, TikTok submitted a plan called “Project Texas,” which, in addition to moving data to U.S.-based servers, proposed measures like procuring a new security team based in the U.S., giving the American government and the software company Oracle oversight of the app’s algorithm, and allowing CFIUS to do regular security audits.
Experts quickly poked holes in the reported details of Project Texas, and after months of silence from the Biden administration — during which TikTok went on a PR offensive in Washington, D.C. — CFIUS reportedly rejected the proposal and seemed poised to commit to an ultimatum: Divest or get banned.
Around this time, TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, spent a tense five hours testifying in front of a House committee about a handful of TikTok concerns, chief among them its ties with the CCP. Based on reports from the hearing, lawmakers from both parties came out swinging and spent a lot of time interrupting Chew to tell him just how dangerous they believed his app was. (A spokeswoman for TikTok said the hearing was “dominated by political grandstanding.”) At one point, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton accused the CEO of having personal affiliations with the CCP, despite Chew’s repeated statements that he is Singaporean, not Chinese.
During the hearing, Chew acknowledged that he reports directly to ByteDance’s chief executive and some TikTok employees have stock options with ByteDance. But he insisted the rejected Project Texas plan would have sufficiently protected American data and argued that banning TikTok would stifle free expression.
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So what happens next?
On March 7, the House’s special China-focused committee voted 50-0 to approve a new bipartisan bill that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok in 165 days. If the app doesn’t divest, it will be illegal for app-store operators like Apple and Google to make it available for download.
Despite TikTok’s efforts to fight the bill — which have involved several push notifications urging users to call their representatives — it’s met little opposition from American politicians. (Per the Washington Post, Biden’s support for TikTok security, combined with concerns over the app’s potential influence on how the Israel-Hamas conflict is covered, has pushed lawmakers to move faster.) About a month after the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass the new measure, the Senate sent it to Biden’s desk as part of a $95 billion package that also includes aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel. Per the New York Times, the Senate made one change to the legislation: stretching TikTok’s sale deadline to nine months with an optional 90-day extension. Biden signed it into law Wednesday morning, starting the twelve-month clock.
Still, we’re probably nowhere close to a TikTok ban. It’s after Biden’s sign-off that things will get tricky — experts have predicted the bill will face a myriad of legal challenges, including from TikTok itself, which could take this to the Supreme Court. The app’s leadership is, to put it lightly, pissed off — a spokesman told the New York Times that the bill was “crafted in secret, rushed through the House and ultimately passed as part of a larger, must-pass bill exactly because it is a ban Americans will find objectionable.” He added that it was “sadly ironic” to see Congress “trampling 170 million Americans’ right to free expression” while claiming to be “advancing freedom around the world.” A spokeswoman for the ACLU, which has publicly opposed the bill, told the New York Times the organization is considering taking part in litigation.
Meanwhile, the logistics of a forced sale are still murky. Chinese leadership has made it clear it’s not a fan of the bill Biden signed and the country could block both the sale and technology exports. Even without those hurdles, other experts have questioned who would want to buy TikTok, which is estimated to be worth $100 billion; acquiring it would also involve the complex logistics of ensuring it totally breaks ties with ByteDance. The other major complication: By the time we get to the 12-month deadline for a sale, Biden may not still be president. With all of this up in the air, experts have said it could be years before we see any part of this new law take effect.
This post has been updated.
