Last week, TikTok announced U.S. officials had given its Chinese ownership two options: Sell the app or risk a nationwide ban. Lawmakers questioned TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, about the app’s ties to China.
Some platforms are so powerful, their names are now verbs: Google, Uber, Instagram, Netflix.
American tech giants have long dominated the global tech industry bringing economic benefits to the United States and granting a strategic advantage in national security.
Tech companies gather incredible amounts of data about their users, including travel history, social connections and viewing preferences. This data can be exploited for surveillance, law enforcement and espionage, as we’ve seen through hacking, theft and illegal data purchases. With court approval, the U.S. government can demand that social media giants based in the U.S. and subject our laws, hand over this data.
Then came TikTok. The social media app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has more than one billion users worldwide including about 150 million Americans. Under China’s authoritarian regime, the government has sweeping control over tech companies and their data. U.S. officials are concerned that China will use TikTok to promote its interests and gather personal information on Americans.
There are two primary reasons for concern.
First, the threat of Chinese espionage. ByteDance engineers in China had accessed American users’ private data and the company admitted that employees, including two based in China, spied on journalists and obtained their IP addresses. Although ByteDance has close ties to China, TikTok has denied that it has given data to the government.
Second, ByteDance could use TikTok’s algorithms to influence Americans. TikTok has been accused of censoring videos about politically sensitive subjects for China, like Tibetan independence and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
“A Chinese company owns what has become America’s number one culture maker right now,” a Times reporter who covers TikTok, said. In the future, lawmakers say, it’s easy to imagine how China could use TikTok to shape American attitudes about Taiwan — or even an American presidential campaign.
The U.S. is escalating efforts to limit TikTok’s power. The federal government and more than half of the states have banned TikTok from government devices and networks. Britain, Canada and Belgium have done the same. India banned the app entirely. Now the U.S. is threatening a nationwide ban, too.
Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, but judges rejected his attempt. Now, the government is trying again, though it’s unclear exactly how a ban would be implemented. There is no precedent for U.S. restrictions on an app this big.
One approach is to remove TikTok from Apple’s and Google’s app stores and make it nonfunctional on U.S. cellphone networks. But the government couldn’t reach into users’ phones to delete the app. TikTok would still be accessible to those who already have it, though users couldn’t download updates to the app, which would probably render it unusable eventually.
Any ban faces legal and political hurdles, including First Amendment protections and angering TikTok users.
The U.S. may want to force a sale of TikTok to an American company, but this path is murky and could trigger antitrust concerns for potential buyers like Microsoft.
China has banned apps like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and tightly controlled the internet to isolate its citizens. The U.S. is now considering using a similar playbook, using private companies as a national asset to limit information as a form of sanctioning