Is a TikTok Ban Coming?

In recent months, there has been a hardening of views toward the wildly popular social media app TikTok on Capitol Hill, among many U.S. state governments, and some officials in the Biden administration. Congressional legislation would potentially shut off U.S. users’ access to TikTok roughly six months from now, disappointing its primarily young viewership.

As CBS News has reported, “Americans could lose access to TikTok within six months if a bill that seeks to force its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to sell its stake is signed into law. But the popular video-sharing app’s potential demise in the United States depends on whether the legislation can overcome a number of hurdles in Congress and survive legal scrutiny. Lawmakers have long tried to regulate the platform because of its ties to China. They argue it threatens national security because the Chinese government could use TikTok to spy on Americans or weaponize it to covertly influence the U.S. public by amplifying or suppressing certain content … The House overwhelmingly passed a measure on March 13 that gives ByteDance a choice: sell TikTok within six months or lose access to app stores and web-hosting services in the United States.”

Other developed states have similar fears. Germany’s leaders have expressed deep concerns about TikTok and suggested it could be banned; other European leaders have shared these concerns. U.S. state governments have increasingly expressed fears, with many banning TikTok from government-issued mobile devices and Montana trying to completely ban TikTok from the state—a ban blocked by a federal judge arguing that it violated the First Amendment rights of users. (A federal ban would also probably be challenged in court.)

The fear, expressed by many policymakers, is that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, which has close links to the Chinese Communist Party, could be used as a tool to gather information on its users (more so even than that collected by U.S.-based social media companies) and could also censor commentary critical of Beijing, or be used as a tool to spread disinformation.  

How greatly should they be concerned? As I noted in my most recent book, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive, which focused on China’s information and influence efforts, “TikTok, for instance, which harvests vast amounts of users’ data, claims that it has not given any users’ information to  Beijing, but the U.S. government is investigating whether the company has exfiltrated a range of data back to China. (Another app owned by ByteDance, Douyin, essentially the Chinese version of TikTok, clearly employs censorship and user monitoring.)

There are already examples of TikTok seeming to remove comments from the app, such as comments made outside China that were critical of Beijing. And with Beijing becoming more sophisticated in its disinformation tactics in recent years—they were very clumsy in the past—there is a genuine concern that TikTok, along with Chinese disinformation on other platforms, now more sophisticated, could be used to affect voters in Australia, Canada, Europe, the United States, and other countries. More likely than not, it appears now, that if Beijing will not sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to a U.S. firm—something it has firmly rejected, as it sees TikTok as a Chinese crown jewel—the giant social media app might indeed wind up being banned in the United States.