argumentative essay on banning tiktok

The Grim Reality of Banning TikTok

T he U.S. government, once again, wants to ban TikTok. The app has become an incontrovertible force on American phones since it launched in 2016, defining the sounds and sights of pandemic-era culture. TikTok’s burst on the scene also represented a first for American consumers, and officials—a popular social media app that wasn’t started on Silicon Valley soil, but in China.

On March 13, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok or else the app will be banned on American phones. The government will fine the two major mobile app stores and any cloud hosting companies to ensure that Americans cannot access the app.

While fashioned as a forced divestiture on national security grounds, let’s be real: This is a ban. The intent has always been to ban TikTok, to punish it and its users without solving any of the underlying data privacy issues lawmakers claim to care about. Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw said it outright : “No one is trying to disguise anything… We want to ban TikTok.”

But, as such, a ban of TikTok would eliminate an important place for Americans to speak and be heard. It would be a travesty for the free speech rights of hundreds of millions of Americans who depend on the app to communicate, express themselves, and even make a living. And perhaps more importantly, it would further balkanize the global internet and disconnect us from the world.

Read more: What to Know About the Bill That Could Get TikTok Banned in the U.S.

This isn’t the first time the government has tried to ban TikTok: In 2021, former President Donald Trump issued an executive order that was halted in federal court when a Trump-appointed judge found it was “arbitrary and capricious” because it failed to consider other means of dealing with the problem. Another judge found that the national security threat posted by TikTok was “phrased in the hypothetical.” When the state of Montana tried to ban the app in 2023, a federal judge found it “oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users,” with a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment.”

Trump also opened a national security review with the power to force a divestment, something Biden has continued to this day with no resolution; and last year, lawmakers looked poised to pass a bill banning TikTok, but lost steam after a high-profile grilling of its top executive. (Trump has done an about-face on the issue and recently warned that banning TikTok will only help its U.S. rivals like Meta.)

TikTok stands accused of being a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party, guzzling up sensitive user data and sending it to China. There’s not much evidence to suggest that’s true, except that their parent company ByteDance is a Chinese company, and China’s government has its so-called private sector in a chokehold. In order to stay compliant, you have to play nice.

In all of this, it’s important to remember that America is not China. America doesn't have a Great Firewall with our very own internet free from outside influences. America allows all sorts of websites that the government likes, dislikes, and fears onto our computers. So there’s an irony in allowing Chinese internet giants onto America’s internet when, of course, American companies like Google and Meta’s services aren’t allowed on Chinese computers.

And because of America’s robust speech protections under the First Amendment, the U.S. finds itself playing a different ballgame than the Chinese government in this moment. These rights protect Americans against the U.S. government, not from corporations like TikTok, Meta, YouTube, or Twitter, despite the fact that they do have outsized influence over modern communication. No, the First Amendment says that the government cannot stop you from speaking without a damned good reason. In other words, you’re protected against Congress—not TikTok.

The clearest problem with a TikTok ban is it would immediately wipe out a platform where 170 million Americans broadcast their views and receive information—sometimes about political happenings. In an era of mass polarization, shutting off the app would mean shutting down the ways in which millions of people—even those with unpopular views—speak out on issues they care about. The other problem is that Americans have the constitutional right to access all sorts of information—even if it’s deemed to be foreign propaganda. There’s been little evidence to suggest that ByteDance is influencing the flow of content at the behest of the Chinese government, though there’s some reports that are indeed worrying, including reports that TikTok censored videos related to the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibetan independence, and the banned group Falun Gong.

Still, the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that Americans have the right to receive what the government deems to be foreign propaganda. In Lamont v. Postmaster General , for instance, the Court ruled that the government couldn’t halt the flow of Soviet propaganda through the mail. The Court essentially said that the act of the government stepping in and banning propaganda would be akin to censorship, and the American people need to be free to evaluate these transgressive ideas for themselves.

Further, the government has repeatedly failed to pass any federal data privacy protections that would address the supposed underlying problem of TikTok gobbling up troves of U.S. user data and handing it to a Chinese parent company. Biden only made moves in February 2024 to prevent data brokers from selling U.S. user data to foreign adversaries like China, arguably a problem much bigger than one app. But the reality is that the government has long been more interested in banning a media company than dealing with a real public policy issue.

There is legitimate concern in Washington and elsewhere that it’s not the government that controls so much of America’s speech, but private companies like those bred in Silicon Valley. But the disappearance of TikTok would further empower media monopolists like Google and Meta, who already control about half of all U.S. digital ad dollars, and give them a tighter choke hold over our communication. There’s already a paucity of platforms where people speak; removing TikTok would eliminate one of the most important alternatives we have.

Since it launched in 2016, TikTok has been the most influential social media app in the world, not because it affects public policy or necessarily creates monoculture—neither are particularly true, in fact—but because it has given people a totally different way to spend time online. In doing so, it disrupted the monopolies of American tech companies like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and forced every rival to in some way mimic its signature style. There’s Facebook and Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat Spotlight, and every other app seems to be an infinitely-scrolling video these days.

Still, Americans choose to use TikTok and their conversations will not easily port over to another platform in the event of it being banned. Instead, cutting through the connective tissue of the app will sever important ways that Americans—especially young Americans—are speaking at a time when those conversations are as rich as ever.

The reality is that if Congress wanted to solve our data privacy problems, they would solve our data privacy problems. But instead, they want to ban TikTok, so they’ve found a way to try and do so. The bill will proceed to the Senate floor, then to the president’s desk, and then it will land in the U.S. court system. At that point, our First Amendment will once again be put to the test—a free speech case that’s very much not in the abstract, but one whose results will affect 170 million Americans who just want to use an app and have their voices be heard.

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The TikTok logo is seen on a cell phone on Oct. 14, 2022, in Boston. Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States, reflecting growing worries from authorities over the Chinese-owned video sharing app.

Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

• Bruce Schneier

Barath Raghavan

The ban would hurt americans—and there are better ways to protect their data..

Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States. We are here as technologists to tell you that this is a terrible idea and the side effects would be intolerable. Details matter. There are several ways Congress might ban TikTok, each with different efficacies and side effects. In the end, all the effective ones would destroy the free internet as we know it.

There’s no doubt that TikTok and ByteDance, the company that owns it, are shady. They, like most large corporations in China, operate at the pleasure of the Chinese government. They collect extreme levels of information about users. But they’re not alone: Many apps you use do the same, including Facebook and Instagram, along with seemingly innocuous apps that have no need for the data. Your data is bought and sold by data brokers you’ve never heard of who have few scruples about where the data ends up. They have digital dossiers on most people in the United States.

If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone. Such laws would protect us in the long term, and not just from the app of the week. They would also prevent data breaches and ransomware attacks from spilling our data out into the digital underworld, including hacker message boards and chat servers, hostile state actors, and outside hacker groups. And, most importantly, they would be compatible with our bedrock values of free speech and commerce, which Congress’s current strategies are not.

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What the debate over TikTok means for the future of social media

Subscribe to the center for technology innovation newsletter, mishaela robison and mishaela robison research assistant @mishaelarobison jack karsten jack karsten former senior research analyst, center for technology innovation - the brookings institution @jtkarsten.

October 12, 2020

It has been an eventful few months for TikTok: The social media platform recently won an injunction against a nationwide ban while it negotiates a deal with Oracle and Walmart to satisfy President Trump’s executive orders demanding a sale to a U.S. company. With the November deadline for a deal upcoming, the shifting contours of the transaction and concerns over the app’s security will have important ramifications for future technology policy.

The TikTok app has consistently topped worldwide download charts and recently celebrated the best quarter of downloads in app history. Yet this very popularity fueled concerns about data security and potential foreign espionage from China, where TikTok’s current parent company ByteDance is located. Though some TikTok users have speculated that the executive orders have been in retaliation to the platform’s role in organizing opposition to Trump’s reelection campaign , the app has been under national security review since 2019 due to its rising influence in the U.S., which suggests several overlapping motivations.

Other social media platforms have benefitted from the pandemonium surrounding TikTok’s current legal challenges, lessening the focus on their own products and services and attracting TikTok users. But the perceived political motivation to ban TikTok based on its Chinese origins sets a damaging precedent for other social media platforms balancing global ambitions with the U.S.’s broader handling of foreign relations.

Ties to China

Prior to issuing his executive order, Trump stated that he did not mind if “a very American company buys [TikTok.]” His sentiments were rooted in the administration’s growing distrust of Chinese technology companies. TikTok had previously attempted to allay the president’s concerns by storing Americans’ data on U.S. soil, hiring an American CEO, and employing lobbyists in Washington. Further, TikTok’s founder chose to create separate apps for the Chinese and global markets so that users around the world could avoid censorship requirements from the Chinese Communist Party. Still, efforts to assure the U.S. government that TikTok would not give data to the Chinese government have not been sufficient enough to quell concerns over Chinese influence and interference through the app.

Despite Trump’s initial demand that TikTok be acquired by an American company, the current deal proposal still allows ByteDance an 80% ownership stake in the newly established entity, TikTok Global, with 20% ownership from potential buyers Oracle and Walmart. It also remains unclear if such a proposal will be enough to eliminate other lingering concerns about the social media giant. Several lawmakers, including Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO,) criticized prior deals for not sufficiently severing ties with China. Trump himself has expressed similar sentiment in the past by vowing not to sign off if ByteDance maintains any organizational control. For now, American companies appear likely to acquire a minority of the social media giant with Trump’s “blessing” in spite of the majority control left to a company which has previously censored anti-China content on TikTok.

Reflected in both the president’s executive orders and his business guidance is the absence of coherent policy around Chinese technology, leaving TikTok as a precedent for future actions. Ongoing negotiations between TikTok and other companies signal a need for a comprehensive strategy for dealing with Chinese-based technology firms operating in the U.S. In March, similar scrutiny lead to the sale of the gay dating app Grindr after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) determined that Chinese ownership of the app was a national security risk, though the Committee did not publicly share the evidence underlying that decision. Comparatively, the U.S. government has raised few concerns about data protection on the popular Swedish-based music app Spotify, despite major privacy concerns arising in Sweden. As questions of Chinese-owned tech companies continue to emerge, the U.S. government needs much clearer policies going forward to avoid making decisions an ad hoc manner.

Algorithmic transparency

By many accounts, TikTok’s power comes from its algorithm , which tailors an infinite feed of videos to each individual user’s preferences. As a result, the average TikTok user spends more time on the platform than its competitors. Recent trade restrictions by China have highlighted the value that the country places on the development of powerful algorithms.

Artificial intelligence can be a double-edged sword for social media, providing potential for increased engagement while creating echo chambers, bias, and manipulation. In light of these concerns, TikTok pledged to share their algorithm with external experts, a move that came days before the House Antitrust Hearing confronted Big Tech CEOs for their lack of transparency. In a blog post announcing this decision, former CEO Kevin Mayer called on other social media companies to do the same, emphasizing TikTok’s commitment to accountability. Mayer vowed to use TikTok’s time in the spotlight to “drive deeper conversations around algorithms, transparency, and content moderation, and to develop stricter rules of the road.”

TikTok’s openness may set a new benchmark for other social media companies, challenging them to be more transparent about their algorithms or risk losing trust. Though experts have debated the degree to which algorithms should be made transparent, research from the Stanford Department of Communication found that users trust algorithms more when presented with at least some information on how they work. These factors point to a need for algorithmic transparency, and the urgency of policy to enforce it.

Privacy enhancements

When asked about a potential Microsoft acquisition, co-founder Bill Gates described “being big in the social media business” as “a poison chalice” due to questions of encryption and privacy. Similarly, implicit in concerns that China may have access to TikTok users’ data are questions about data security and privacy. TikTok has previously faced criticism—and a lawsuit —for failing to protect the data privacy of minors, resulting in heightened privacy measures that they have only partially implemented.

Though, as a viral TikTok video pointed out, Facebook currently tracks more user data than TikTok, despite the latter engaging in concerning several data acquisition tactics . Since the ban was announced, major employers such as Wells Fargo and the federal government , and the Biden campaign have prohibited their staff from using the app due to security concerns. If ByteDance retains any part of U.S. operations, they could still be required to send data to Chinese companies under the country’s national security law. In the past, critics have also accused Oracle of selling personal user data , which suggests a need for greater privacy regulation for all companies in the United States, regardless of national origin.

Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s new global head, has said her primary focus will be the app’s creators and users . If that is the case, she must first address the security of their data and institute appropriate privacy mechanisms.

TikTok exemplifies the necessity for comprehensive policies regarding foreign tech companies. While the fate of the imminent deal remains ambiguous, the tech world will be watching to determine if the company’s partnership with Oracle and Walmart can ameliorate the concerns that prompted calls for its removal from app stores. Reflexive condemnation of Chinese-based technology companies without a systematic policy basis is likely to prove ineffective and confusing in the long run. The current policy ambiguity misses an opportunity to pursue greater transparency and accountability from all technology companies.

No matter the ultimate outcome, TikTok has left an indelible mark on the social media industry. The questions raised by recent action are not new and illuminate gaps in policy which concern the future of the entire tech sector.

Facebook is a general, unrestricted donor to the Brookings Institution. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions posted in this piece are solely those of the author and not influenced by any donation.

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Why the U.S. Should Not Ban TikTok

The ban would hurt americans—and there are better ways to protect their data..

• Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan
• Foreign Policy
• February 23, 2023

Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States. We are here as technologists to tell you that this is a terrible idea and the side effects would be intolerable. Details matter. There are several ways Congress might ban TikTok, each with different efficacies and side effects. In the end, all the effective ones would destroy the free internet as we know it.

There’s no doubt that TikTok and ByteDance, the company that owns it, are shady. They, like most large corporations in China, operate at the pleasure of the Chinese government. They collect extreme levels of information about users. But they’re not alone: Many apps you use do the same, including Facebook and Instagram, along with seemingly innocuous apps that have no need for the data. Your data is bought and sold by data brokers you’ve never heard of who have few scruples about where the data ends up. They have digital dossiers on most people in the United States.

If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone. Such laws would protect us in the long term, and not just from the app of the week. They would also prevent data breaches and ransomware attacks from spilling our data out into the digital underworld, including hacker message boards and chat servers, hostile state actors, and outside hacker groups. And, most importantly, they would be compatible with our bedrock values of free speech and commerce, which Congress’s current strategies are not.

At best, the TikTok ban considered by Congress would be ineffective; at worst, a ban would force us to either adopt China’s censorship technology or create our own equivalent. The simplest approach, advocated by some in Congress , would be to ban the TikTok app from the Apple and Google app stores. This would immediately stop new updates for current users and prevent new users from signing up. To be clear, this would not reach into phones and remove the app. Nor would it prevent Americans from installing TikTok on their phones; they would still be able to get it from sites outside of the United States. Android users have long been able to use alternative app repositories. Apple maintains a tighter control over what apps are allowed on its phones, so users would have to “jailbreak”—or manually remove restrictions from—their devices to install TikTok.

Even if app access were no longer an option, TikTok would still be available more broadly. It is currently, and would still be, accessible from browsers, whether on a phone or a laptop. As long as the TikTok website is hosted on servers outside of the United States, the ban would not affect browser access.

Alternatively, Congress might take a financial approach and ban U.S. companies from doing business with ByteDance. Then-President Donald Trump tried this in 2020, but it was blocked by the courts and rescinded by President Joe Biden a year later. This would shut off access to TikTok in app stores and also cut ByteDance off from the resources it needs to run TikTok. U.S. cloud-computing and content-distribution networks would no longer distribute TikTok videos, collect user data, or run analytics. U.S. advertisers—and this is critical—could no longer fork over dollars to ByteDance in the hopes of getting a few seconds of a user’s attention. TikTok, for all practical purposes, would cease to be a business in the United States.

But Americans would still be able to access TikTok through the loopholes discussed above. And they will: TikTok is one of the most popular apps ever made; about 70 percent of young people use it. There would be enormous demand for workarounds. ByteDance could choose to move its U.S.-centric services right over the border to Canada, still within reach of American users. Videos would load slightly slower, but for today’s TikTok users, it would probably be acceptable. Without U.S. advertisers ByteDance wouldn’t make much money, but it has operated at a loss for many years, so this wouldn’t be its death knell.

Finally, an even more restrictive approach Congress might take is actually the most dangerous: dangerous to Americans, not to TikTok. Congress might ban the use of TikTok by anyone in the United States. The Trump executive order would likely have had this effect, were it allowed to take effect. It required that U.S. companies not engage in any sort of transaction with TikTok and prohibited circumventing the ban. . If the same restrictions were enacted by Congress instead, such a policy would leave business or technical implementation details to U.S. companies, enforced through a variety of law enforcement agencies.

This would be an enormous change in how the internet works in the United States. Unlike authoritarian states such as China, the U.S. has a free, uncensored internet. We have no technical ability to ban sites the government doesn’t like. Ironically, a blanket ban on the use of TikTok would necessitate a national firewall, like the one China currently has, to spy on and censor Americans’ access to the internet. Or, at the least, authoritarian government powers like India’s, which could force internet service providers to censor internet traffic. Worse still, the main vendors of this censorship technology are in those authoritarian states. China, for example, sells its firewall technology to other censorship-loving autocracies such as Iran and Cuba .

All of these proposed solutions raise constitutional issues as well. The First Amendment protects speech and assembly . For example, the recently introduced Buck-Hawley bill , which instructs the president to use emergency powers to ban TikTok, might threaten separation of powers and may be relying on the same mechanisms used by Trump and stopped by the court. (Those specific emergency powers, provided by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, have a specific exemption for communications services.) And individual states trying to beat Congress to the punch in regulating TikTok or social media generally might violate the Constitution’s Commerce Clause—which restricts individual states from regulating interstate commerce—in doing so.

Right now, there’s nothing to stop Americans’ data from ending up overseas. We’ve seen plenty of instances—from Zoom to Clubhouse to others —where data about Americans collected by U.S. companies ends up in China, not by accident but because of how those companies managed their data. And the Chinese government regularly steals data from U.S. organizations for its own use: Equifax , Marriott Hotels , and the Office of Personnel Management are examples.

If we want to get serious about protecting national security, we have to get serious about data privacy. Today, data surveillance is the business model of the internet. Our personal lives have turned into data; it’s not possible to block it at our national borders. Our data has no nationality, no cost to copy, and, currently, little legal protection. Like water, it finds every crack and flows to every low place. TikTok won’t be the last app or service from abroad that becomes popular, and it is distressingly ordinary in terms of how much it spies on us. Personal privacy is now a matter of national security. That needs to be part of any debate about banning TikTok.

Categories: Laws and Regulations , Privacy and Surveillance

Tags: Foreign Policy

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.

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National & World Affairs

Will the us ban tiktok.

Timothy Edgar, a former national security and intelligence official and lecturer at Harvard Law School, says a full ban of the video-sharing app isn’t likely, but regulation may be needed

With its individualized feed of endless videos featuring carefully choreographed dances, meme challenges, mundane slices of life, and other miscellanea, TikTok would seem to be most dangerous for its addictive hold on users’ attention. But national security experts are concerned about another potential problem with the app, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance — its ability to collect, store, and possibly even share data about its tens of millions of U.S.-based users.

The fears surrounding the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to obtain and use that information are not new. Former President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok in 2020, but it stalled in the courts and was eventually rescinded by President Joe Biden. Now, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers is once again raising the alarm about TikTok as concerns over spying by China have grown, prompting several states and the federal government to prohibit the app’s use on government-issued devices.

Timothy H. Edgar ’97 , a former national security and intelligence official and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, advised President Barack Obama ’91 on cybersecurity policy and privacy issues. In an interview with Harvard Law Today, Edgar says that while he doubts the Biden administration will push for a full ban on the app “unless there is a huge scandal,” he believes lawmakers will move to regulate TikTok in some way. But Edgar says it’s important to consider users’ rights to freedom of expression and discusses the national security and civil liberties concerns, the legal challenges a ban would face, and why our treatment of TikTok could impact U.S.-based platforms.

“There are a lot of legitimate concerns, and we will be debating the issue for many years to come,” Edgar predicts.

Harvard Law Today: Before we talk about TikTok specifically, could you set the stage for us on the issue of national security and its relationship to tech?

Timothy H. Edgar: Although these are very new issues for the United States, they’re not new for most of the world. We’ve been the world hub in terms of physical connections to the internet — if you look at a map of the global traffic, it all runs through North America, and especially the U.S. We’ve also been the commercial hub with platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon Web Services. Other countries have worried about their data being in the hands of the U.S., especially after Edward Snowden’s revelations about global surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency. We’re on the receiving end of it now.

TikTok is the latest controversy, but there have been previous controversies about Zoom and its connections to Chinese companies, or WeChat, or Huawei. So, whatever we do with TikTok, I think it’s important for us to understand that we’re setting a precedent, not just for our own national security concerns, but for how we think other countries can and should address their sovereignty concerns when it comes to the internet. We want whatever we do to be something we’re comfortable with other countries doing to us or to potential allies.

HLT: What are the main national security concerns surrounding TikTok?

Edgar: I think there are many valid concerns. The government identified two major ones during the litigation against President Trump’s executive order. One was access to user data of Americans by TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, and presumably also by the Chinese government, and that includes all sorts of data like location and user communications. It also includes not just public data viewable on TikTok, but all the user data associated with it, such as a person’s phone usage. The other big concern has to do with propaganda that might be subtly or not so subtly pushed by the TikTok platform, or censoring or shadow-banning disfavored content or disfavored views.

“It’s important for us to understand that we’re setting a precedent, not just for our own national security concerns, but for how we think other countries can and should address their sovereignty concerns when it comes to the internet.”

HLT: What are the civil liberties issues we need to consider when deciding what to do about the app?

Edgar: As I said, I think there are serious national security concerns with all sorts of aspects of our cyber infrastructure. But that leads us to ask: What should we do about it?

I think there are many civil liberties concerns with a ban on TikTok. First is obviously freedom of expression. There are 100 million U.S. users on TikTok, some of them important influencers that have made this a big part of their identity and part of their self-expression, and banning it would have a severe impact on them. There is also freedom of communication. TikTok is a platform where people are communicating privately as well as publicly — this would be a direct infringement of the choices of those users.

The second point would be the example we’re setting around the world for internet freedom. Typically, the U.S. government has protested when other countries ban U.S.-based apps or companies. So, if there’s a way to address our concerns about national security short of a ban, I would think that those are good reasons to at least consider that. We don’t want to be in the position of ‘do as we say, not as we do.’

The power to ban TikTok

HLT: How would a full ban work? Can the president unilaterally ban the app, or would Congress have to act?

Edgar: The experience we had from the Trump bans — which were quickly enjoined by the courts — shows us that it’s not so easy for the president to just unilaterally ban TikTok under what is known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. The reason for that is interesting. IEEPA has a very broad set of powers for the president to prohibit transactions because of foreign policy concerns in an emergency. But there are exceptions in that law that almost look like they’re written for TikTok and the internet — but they weren’t. One exception is for personal communications that do not involve a transfer of value. And another one involves information or informational materials, including but not limited to publications, films, posters, artworks, and newswire feeds.

Where did those exceptions come from? During the Cold War days, the U.S. embargo against Cuba was interpreted to include activists and other Americans who were just interested in buying magazines from Cuba, and they couldn’t. They wanted to send messages back and forth to Cuba and the embargo stopped them. Congress thought that this was going too far because of the impact on freedom of expression and added those exceptions to IEEPA.

The courts, when they were considering Trump’s ban, pointed to those exceptions. Of course, Congress could change the law — could change IEEPA — but we’d still be opening up potential constitutional challenges. And you would also have to wonder about the impact on freedom of expression when you limit those exceptions.

“Even if we agree that China is an adversary, that China is a serious cyber threat, and that there are serious issues around TikTok, you want a policy that doesn’t just appear tough — you want one that works.”

HLT: Let’s say that Congress or the president opts for a full ban on the app. What kinds of legal challenges can we expect to see?

Edgar: Without congressional action, I think you’d see that same challenge based on the wording of IEEPA. I think you would probably also see First Amendment challenges, maybe challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act. I think it would be tied up in the courts at a minimum, and those challenges might succeed.

The way I’d look at it is, Trump’s ban was really a sledgehammer. It was, in my opinion at least, designed to make headlines, almost a form of trolling. As long as you get the headlines about trying to ban TikTok, whether you succeed or not, maybe that serves the political goal. And maybe Biden has the same motivation. But if what you’re trying to do is address national security concerns, I think you want an approach that’s more likely to survive a court challenge.

HLT: Is there another way to address this issue short of a full ban?

Edgar: President Biden has been pursuing a more measured approach. There’s a process separate from the IEEPA process involving the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. CFIUS has been around for a long time. For certain sensitive industries, especially those involving defense, there are a set of restrictions on foreign investments. For example, if a foreign company tried to buy a U.S. defense contractor, they might not be allowed to buy it at all. If they were allowed to, they’d have to get the terms of that deal approved by the CFIUS.

ByteDance has been working very hard to address U.S. national security concerns, and has done a lot of lobbying, and part of that is to try to use the CFIUS process. Some of the safeguards they’ve agreed to include a separate independent board — what is sometimes called onshoring or reshoring. They’ve invested around a billion dollars in Texas to try to bring servers and the data infrastructure for TikTok into the U.S. They’ve also set up oversight mechanisms.

Frankly, I’m not necessarily sure all that is enough. But I do think that regulations are more likely to survive in the courts, rather than a flat out ban. Maybe it amounts to the same thing if the approach is so restrictive that the company chooses not to do it. But you have to at least try to show that you can address the concerns in a way other than just by banning it.

HLT: This issue seems to have attracted an unusual level of bipartisan support. Why do you think that is?

Edgar: I think there are two reasons — a substantive reason and a political reason. The substantive reason is that both parties recognize that there’s a serious cybersecurity threat to the U.S. now, and that China is among the most sophisticated adversaries the U.S. faces when it comes to cybersecurity. There have been several hearings in Congress, often bipartisan, that have addressed these issues, and so many members of Congress have had a history of working together on cyber threats.

But there’s also a political issue, which is that the Republicans see a lot of mileage in going after the Biden administration on China. We saw that with the spy balloon criticisms, we’ve seen that with arguments about business interests of the Biden family. In some ways, it’s a political response to the Democrats going after Trump on Russia. Democrats sense that there might be some vulnerability there, and so they want to show that they’re really tough on China. That can be a dangerous dynamic, because even if we agree that China is an adversary, that China is a serious cyber threat, and that there are serious issues around TikTok, you want a policy that doesn’t just appear tough — you want one that works.

Regulating tech and the Golden Rule

HLT: The U.S. has criticized China for blocking American tech companies for national security reasons. Could this be perceived as “retaliation”? Is the situation with TikTok different?

Edgar: China’s arguments for blocking U.S. tech companies look at least superficially quite similar to the U.S. arguments for blocking TikTok. It really comes down to the domination that the U.S. has had over the internet for decades now. What’s different about TikTok is that China and the United States are very different from each other. The relationship that the Chinese state has to its companies is a very different relationship than the relationship the U.S. government has to its companies. For example, President Xi has a whole cyber power committee that’s composed of the CEOs and owners of the major technology companies in China. In the U.S., it would be hard to imagine a committee like that. Certainly, the U.S. government meets with companies in Silicon Valley, but there is far more independence in the U.S. There’s also the rule of law — that U.S. companies have the ability to challenge in court what the government is asking them to do when it comes to things like surveillance.

“We have to keep in mind the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That will help inform what makes sense from a public policy point of view.”

HLT: So, should we treat social media and other online platforms owned by foreign actors differently than those owned by U.S.-based companies?

Edgar: I think the answer is yes. I think it’s a matter of common sense — whether you’re talking about user data or about broader policies across the internet — that when a major company has a platform located outside the United States, it’s going to present different policy issues for the U.S. government than if it’s an American company. Sometimes that will require additional levels of oversight and control, as we’re seeing with TikTok. And that, to me, is fine and makes a great deal of sense.

But two points on that. First, we should really be only adopting controls that we think are justified if they were applied to us in reverse. Whatever controls we adopt, whatever standard we come up with, those ought to be things that if another country did that to Facebook, or Google, or Amazon, we’d say, ‘those controls seem reasonable to us.’

We also should not be blind to the differences between democratic and authoritarian countries in practice. We could design a set of controls on paper for TikTok, and those controls would be subject to court challenges, to the rule of law. You could imagine China or another country looking at those controls, and saying, ‘Well, we’re going do the same thing.’ But are they really going to be the same? If it is an authoritarian country, they may not have the environment in which to make those controls work in a way that doesn’t impact freedom of expression or some of our other values.

As I’ve said, whatever concerns we have towards TikTok or other apps, when we’re thinking about how to draft rules and regulations, I think we have to keep in mind the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That will help inform what makes sense from a public policy point of view.

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LESSON PLAN

Should tiktok be banned.

Analyzing Authors’ Claims

Read the Article

YES: Mike Gallagher, Republican Congressman of Wisconsin NO: Ryan Calo, Professor of Law, University of Washington

Analyze the debate.

1. Set Focus Frame the inquiry with this essential question: What are valid reasons—if any—for the government of a democracy to ban the use of something?

2. R ead and Discuss Have students read the debate and then answer the following questions:

• What is the issue being debated? How does it relate to current events? (The issue is whether the U.S. government should ban the use of TikTok. This is a timely issue because concerns have been raised as a result of TikTok being owned by a Chinese company.)
• Evaluate why these two authors might be interested in and qualified to comment on this issue. (As a U.S. congressman, Mike Gallagher helps set national security policies and laws. As a law professor, Ryan Calo has an expert-level understanding of citizens’ rights as protected by the Constitution.)
• Analyze Gallagher’s view. (Gallagher argues in favor of banning TikTok. He says that since it is owned by a Chinese company, it is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party. He says that the C.C.P. can use the app to spread misinformation and censor content it doesn’t want Americans to see.)
• Analyze Calo’s view. (Calo argues against banning TikTok. He says that there is no credible evidence that the company that owns TikTok is regularly sharing information with the Chinese government and that the Chinese government is capable of spying on Americans without TikTok. He says banning the app would set a terrible precedent for free speech.)

Extend & Assess

4. Writing Prompt In an essay, evaluate one of the debaters’ arguments. Assess whether the reasoning is valid and whether it’s supported with evidence. Point out biases or missing information.

5. Classroom Debate Should TikTok be banned? Have students use the authors’ ideas, as well as their own, in a debate.

6. Vote Go online to vote in Upfront’s poll—and see how students across the country voted.

Download a PDF of this Lesson Plan

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The Debate over Banning TikTok, Summarized

The post The Debate over Banning TikTok, Summarized appeared first on Consequence .

This is a preview of Consequence Daily , our free daily newsletter featuring exclusive analysis and essays.   Subscribe now to never miss an issue.

Many experts seem sure that banning TikTok is a great idea, or a bad idea, but I’m enjoying having doubts. There’s too much the public doesn’t know about US classified data, TikTok’s secret algorithm, and more, for any of us to know for certain if our elected officials are over — or under — -reacting. And whether the law will ever be enforced could be even harder to guess.

Before it becomes a ban, the new law President Biden signed on April 24th pressures TikTok owner ByteDance to sell, though few analysts expects this to happen. And it will soon faces challenges in court. But now that Congress and the White House have acted, there are two not-quite-opposing views on the ban that seem the most persuasive. Let’s call them “pro-ban” and “ban or don’t ban, it won’t work.”

The case for at least attempting the ban was well-summarized by  The Atlantic  writer Derek Thompson on his podcast,  Plain English .  Citing posts by the Taiwan-based tech writer Ben Thompson (no relation), Matthew Yglesias, and others, Derek Thompson presented evidence for three claims: “That TikTok is indeed, among other things, a source of news,” he said. “That the Chinese state has a history of directly influencing some of its largest companies; and… that the Chinese state has a demonstrable interest in controlling speech around the world.”

The whole thing is worth a listen and much more expansive than just these three ideas. But to the first point, Thompson notes that “170 million Americans are on TikTok, and roughly half of them say they get their news from the site. Among Americans under 30, TikTok is a more popular source of news than cable news, local news, newspapers, magazines, radio, or podcasts.”

It’s hard to deny TikTok’s reach, so Thompson moves on to China’s history with superstar companies. Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba and one of the richest men in the world, disappeared for four months after he criticized Chinese policy and regulations. During his absence, the Chinese Communist Party took over his company and sold parts of it for scrap. When he returned to public view, it was as a  teacher , not a business man.

Then there’s Tencent, among the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world when the Chinese government decided that too many young people were playing video games. The CCP enforced an  eight-month freeze on new games , radically reoirtening one of its biggest company’s business models. Thompson also mentioned the tech giant Huawei, some products of which have been banned in the US over security concerns, and which is the  target of regulators  in North America and Europe. There’s no reason to think TikTok would be exempt from meddling.

Finally, he shows how Chinese companies including TikTok censored information on US culture war issues like Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. TikTok is already attempting to shape cultural movements in America, in addition to blocking discussion of Chinese genocide, Tank Man, Hong Kong protests, and because of social media actions by their employees, Marriott Hotels and the NBA’s Houston Rockets. Thompson worries that it’s only a matter of time before ByteDance is pressured by China to influence American policy — if it hasn’t already happened.

“Do you want to learn after the next George Floyd-style cataclysm in the culture war that Gen Z has been algorithmically spoon-fed a specific agenda?” he asks. “Do you want to learn months after the 2024 election that the CCP put pressure on ByteDance to tweak their black box algorithm to give greater weight to — let’s just say — your political opponent?”

On the other hand, the case for something like ban nihilism was outlined by Nicole Narea at  Vox . As Narea points out, it’s not at all clear that the ban is constitutional in the US, and a similar state-level initiative in Montana recently  failed  in the courts. Trump previously tried to ban TikTok twice through executive action, only for judges to  block the efforts .

Even if a ban does pass, enforcement may be tough; attempts to censor some types of TikTok content in Russia proved difficult . And some of the experts in Narea’s reporting point out that addressing privacy concerns with TikTok does nothing about, you know, the rest of the internet.

Narea quotes David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saying, “This bill would fail to protect us from the many threats to our digital privacy posed by criminals, private companies, and foreign actors. Comprehensive data privacy legislation is the solution we need — not bans of certain categories of apps.” Even if the ban holds up in courts, it’s fair to wonder how it’ll improve the lives of Americans, or if it’ll just change which companies hoard our data.

Perhaps after the presidential election we’ll learn of TikTok propaganda campaigns ordered by the Chinese government. Perhaps, instead, we’ll hear that most of our elected officials can’t tell a hashtag from hash browns. Maybe both are true, and maybe we’ll never find out. But TikTok was already turning into a digital mall with TikTok Shop, and I doubt any creators who used it will be silent for long. I don’t know if the TikTok ban is a good idea, and I don’t know if it’ll work, but I know to celebrate the creators and not the platforms.

The Debate over Banning TikTok, Summarized Wren Graves

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TikTok: Tackling the Risk of a Ban

By: Arpita Agnihotri, Saurabh Bhattacharya

In early July 2020, the US government was considering banning TikTok, a social media platform for creating and sharing short videos, because its Chinese ownership had led to national security…

• Length: 12 page(s)
• Publication Date: Nov 30, 2020
• Discipline: General Management
• Product #: W20945-PDF-ENG

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In early July 2020, the US government was considering banning TikTok, a social media platform for creating and sharing short videos, because its Chinese ownership had led to national security concerns. The founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, had taken several measures to distance TikTok from China, including hiring an American CEO and establishing offices in Los Angeles, California, and London, England. However, ByteDance investors expressed concerns that the company's Chinese ownership would still remain a liability. How could the founder and CEO prevent a possible ban on TikTok in the United States? Should he sell ByteDance's stake in TikTok to American investors? Did he have other options?

Arpita Agnihotri is affiliated with Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg. Saurabh Bhattacharya is affiliated with Newcastle University.

Learning Objectives

This case is intended for undergraduate-and graduate-level courses in general management, principles of management, international business, and strategic management. The case elaborates on the challenges associated with a potential ban of a firm due to the firm's country of origin. The case highlights the impact of a ban on stakeholders, including competitors and the app's users. After working through the case and the assignment questions, students will be able to critically analyze the challenges faced by technology firms with a Chinese origin when operating in the United States; explore competitors' responses to such challenges and how the focal firm can counteract its competition; describe how a ban impacts the users of a firm's product or services; and critically analyze the strategies that a firm should consider to deal with a possible ban on its product.

Nov 30, 2020

Discipline:

General Management

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United States

Industries:

Media, entertainment, and professional sports

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• Banning TikTok would be both ineffective and harmful

The US House passed a bill that could ban the social video app, but sending TikTok into the ether won’t make social media any safer

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TikTok , like any place on the internet where a ton of people are watching and sharing and competing for attention, is best understood in terms of both/and.

TikTok is both a vital platform for community building and plagued by dangerous misinformation . TikTok is both uniquely good at providing a means for non- influencers to reach a huge audience and a platform that has failed , again and again, to fairly and adequately moderate the content posted there. TikTok is both riddled with huge concerns about the privacy of the data it collects on its users and, just like any other major social media platform , intent on collecting that data as part of its business model.

On Wednesday morning, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill that could eventually lead to a US ban of the app. Before we get there, some big ifs are in play : if the Senate also passes the legislation, if President Joe Biden follows through on his intention to sign it should the bill arrive on his desk, and if TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t successfully sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner before the legislation’s specified deadline.

Still, the threat of a ban was real enough to prompt TikTok to take action. In a push notification sent to users last week, TikTok urged its users to “speak up now — before your government strips 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free expression.”

As a result, some House offices were inundated with calls, and some lawmakers who supported the bill accused TikTok of using the app to start a “ propaganda campaign .” That language resonates with Republican calls late last year to ban TikTok , citing a viral but unfounded accusation that TikTok’s Chinese owners were “brainwashing” America’s youth with anti- Israel content by forcing it to get views thanks to the platform’s powerful recommendation algorithms.

The gray area of TikTok

One of the challenges of writing about social media is that both/and isn’t nearly as catchy as framing, say, TikTok as wholly good or wholly evil. TikTok’s counter-campaign to lawmakers’ push to frame the app as a data-guzzling Chinese propaganda tool is to point to the creators who make a living on the platform sharing educational, humorous, and otherwise wholesome content. Many of those creators are themselves speaking out about how the platform changed their life or helped them find a voice or earned them money.

Here are a couple both/ands about the bill to ban TikTok : It is both a bill that would potentially upend the livelihoods of people who use the platform as an income source and a bill that would not adequately protect user data across social media. It is both a bill that could have serious consequences for online expression and a bill that seems to be created by people with little understanding of what TikTok actually does.

“I have yet to hear policymakers talk about TikTok in a way that makes me think they know anything about it,” said Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Fiesler, who herself has nearly 115,000 followers on TikTok, expressed frustration that policymakers pushing for a ban of the app routinely cited issues that are “absolutely not unique to TikTok,” such as content moderation, algorithmic unfairness, and data privacy concerns. “The thing that’s unique to TikTok is their relationship to China ,” she added, “which is what makes them concerned about those particular things, I guess.”

As Jason Koebler wrote in his extremely smart essay on all this at 404 Media , “TikTok and the specter of China’s control of it has become a blank canvas for which anyone who has any complaint about social media to paint their argument on.” Sacrificing TikTok isn’t going to save anyone from the deeper problems of social media and algorithmic power. It just might make some lawmakers and advocates pushing for a TikTok ban feel good about themselves.

And, and , yeeting TikTok out of the landscape of social media platforms will hurt a lot of people. TikTok is an enormous hub for activism, Fiesler noted. The site is designed to show users things they want to see, and it’s better at it than a lot of other competitors, such as Instagram Reels.

Sure, the encroachment of the TikTok Shop on the For You Pages of many users has fundamentally changed the experience of being there, but the app remains a powerful tool for community building.

What happens if TikTok goes

If TikTok vanishes, some of the platform’s most successful, full-time creators will be able to find success elsewhere, on Reels or YouTube or streaming. Some already have.

The biggest loss, though, will likely not be felt by people who can make a living as “creators” or “influencers” entirely; a lot of people who make money on TikTok do so almost part-time.

Because TikTok’s algorithms remain skilled at allowing users with small followings to potentially find huge audiences, there are a ton of people on the platform who “don’t have the audience that could help them evolve into other areas of the entertainment industry,” said Zari A. Taylor, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies media and culture.

I like TikTok. I use it. I send way too many videos from the app to my friends. It can be, at its best, a place capable of fostering deep community and meaning . I’ve also covered some of the really bad stuff that TikTok amplifies to users, like videos about drinking Borax and Shop listings for snake oil “cures” that the company profits from .

It’s not a great idea to break up the both/and of TikTok. TikTok is both a valuable space and a platform that deserves deep scrutiny. But vaporizing it is not the solution.

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Is TikTok Really a National Security Threat? Why U.S. Lawmakers Are Pushing to Ban the Popular Social Media App

Last week, in a significant move, the U.S. House of Representatives approved an updated bill that could lead to a nationwide ban of the popular social media video-sharing app TikTok unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, finds a non-Chinese buyer. 

The Senate is expected to vote on the bill this week. President Joe Biden has previously indicated  that he would sign the legislation into law if it receives congressional approval. 

The effort to potentially ban an entire social media platform highlights the growing worry among U.S. lawmakers and government officials about the   national security risks posed by TikTok. These concerns are primarily driven by fears that the Chinese government can covertly use TikTok as a tool to serve Beijing’s strategic interests.

“This bill protects Americans and especially America’s children from the malign influence of Chinese propaganda on the app TikTok,” Representative Michael McCaul (R-Tx) told  Bloomberg  after last week’s House vote. “This app is a spy balloon in Americans’ phones.” 

Ultimately, the growing unease with TikTok reflects the broader concerns among global governments about the potential use of digital platforms for espionage and social engineering to influence public opinions and political outcomes.

Why Do Lawmakers Want To Ban TikTok? 

The legislation, titled the  Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act , would make it unlawful for any “foreign adversary controlled” entity to distribute, maintain, or update any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” within the United States’s borders. 

As specified by  Title 10 of the U.S. Code , North Korea, Russia, Iran, and China are considered “foreign adversary” countries and are prohibited from receiving certain sensitive resources, including rare-earth materials like samarium, cobalt, and tungsten heavy alloy. 

The proposed legislation leaves no room for debate on whether TikTok is “foreign adversary controlled” by explicitly naming the platform and its parent company, ByteDance Ltd., as prohibited entities. 

For several years, lawmakers across the political spectrum have expressed worries that TikTok poses a national security threat by potentially allowing the Chinese government to conduct covert information operations targeting the American public. 

These fears center on the potential for the Chinese government to use TikTok to collect vast amounts of personal data on its American users. This feeds into another concern that, through tailored content algorithms, Beijing could use the app as a conduit for social engineering and means of swaying public opinion in favor of China’s geopolitical interests. 

To a lesser degree, some information security experts have also  warned  that TikTok’s Chinese software could also be used to introduce malware onto unwitting users’ mobile devices.

But is TikTok Really a National Security Threat? 

In light of facing a potential “divest-or-ban” scenario, there’s no real consensus on whether TikTok poses a national security threat. 

TikTok is owned by ByteDance Ltd., a technology company founded in China and currently headquartered in Beijing. However, during Congressional testimony in  March 2023 , TikTok’s CEO, Shou Chew, distanced the platform from its Chinese roots, emphatically denying that it or its parent company were controlled by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or the ruling Chinese Communist Party. 

On a “ Myth vs. Fact ” sheet on its website, TikTok said that 60% of ByteDance Ltd. is owned by global investment groups such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group. Another 20% is held by ByteDance employees, while the remaining 20% is privately owned by the company’s founder, Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming. 

However, the company acknowledges that one percent of TikTok’s mainland Chinese counterpart and subsidiary of ByteDance, “Douyin,” is owned by the PRC as part of China’s “ Golden Share “  law. 

Additionally, like most Chinese companies, ByteDance’s Chinese-based businesses are compelled by law to have an  in-house Communist Party committee composed of CCP party members. Members of these required interoffice groups hold regular meetings to study party practices and President Xi Jinping. Analysts have said  the CCP uses these workplace political cells to extend its grip on the Chinese economy. 

In response, TikTok has  said  CCP’s laws and influence only pertain to “services in the Chinese market and has no bearing on ByteDance’s global operations outside of China, including TikTok, which does not operate in mainland China. “  

To date, the U.S. government has not presented any evidence to suggest that TikTok has been used by the Chinese government as a covert tool against the American public. 

On the contrary, in 2020, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)  reportedly  provided an assessment to the Trump administration that, though it was possible, there was no evidence that Chinese intelligence agencies had used TikTok to gather data or information on its American users. 

Following a classified briefing by national security officials last week, some members of Congress said that current classified intelligence assessments still fail to demonstrate that TikTok is a legitimate threat. 

“Not a single thing we heard in today’s classified briefing was specific to TikTok, “  Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA)  told  the Associated Press. “These are things that are happening on all social media platforms.”

Rather than harping on the PRC’s use of TikTok to surreptitiously gather data on American citizens, current top U.S. intelligence officials have largely focused on concerns over how the platform can be used for social engineering to influence public opinion. 

During her March testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines  acknowledged  that China could use TikTok to influence the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. However, America’s top intelligence official stopped short of saying there was any evidence the platform was being used by the People’s Republic of China for malicious purposes.

In previous congressional testimonies and interviews, both FBI Director  Christopher Wray  and CIA Director  Bill Burns  have expressed similar concerns regarding TikTok, noting the  potential  for China to use the platform for strategic purposes. However, neither official has claimed that TikTok is currently being used or has been used for information warfare.

In the  2024 National Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community , officials said that China was demonstrating a higher degree of sophistication in its influence activity, including experimenting with generative artificial intelligence. The report noted, “TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022. “  

The report, which compiles assessments on the major threats to national interests by the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community, did not explain why TikTok was the only platform specifically mentioned or whether the PRC was equally using other social media apps for influence operations.  

In a March 2023  report , researchers at the  Georgia Tech School of Public Policy Internet Governance Project  concluded that, after a “comprehensive national security threat analysis, “  the fears over the Chinese government weaponizing TikTok were unfounded and vastly overblown. 

“TikTok is a commercially-motivated enterprise, not a tool of the Chinese state, “  researchers concluded in their report. “Chinese government efforts to assert control over ByteDance’s Chinese subsidiaries are targeting its domestic (Chinese) services, not its overseas operations. “  

Georgia Tech researchers also found no evidence that TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm is being manipulated to support Chinese propaganda or the CCP’s strategic interest. 

Conversely, researchers demonstrated that searching and viewing content that would be ruled illegal and banned by mainland Chinese media censors was possible. These examples included videos ridiculing Chinese President Xi Jinping or supporting and advocating for the independence of Hong Kong and Taiwan. 

Additionally, analysts determined that TikTok did not pose a greater espionage risk than any other social media platform.

“ The data collected by TikTok can only be of espionage value if it comes from users who are intimately connected to national security functions and use the app in ways that expose sensitive information, “  researchers wrote. “These risks arise from the use of any social media app, not just TikTok, and cannot be mitigated by arbitrarily banning one app. “

Recent empirical studies have also suggested that concerns about foreign governments’ ability to influence public opinions or political outcomes through social media are exaggerated and sensationalized.

In an extensive longitudinal study of Twitter users published in  Nature Communications  in 2023, researchers found that Russian foreign influence campaigns had no meaningful influence on public attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 

“We find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior, “  researchers wrote.  “ Our results thus provide a corrective to the view that the foreign influence campaign and those like it can easily manipulate the attitudes and voting behavior of ordinary social media users. “

So, considering all available data, comments from lawmakers and intelligence officials, and empirical studies, the answer to whether TikTok currently poses a legitimate national security risk is no.

A handful of past incidents have raised concerns about TikTok and demonstrate the potential for the platform to be used for malicious purposes. 

In 2020,  BuzzFeed News  published leaked audio recordings of internal TikTok meetings that revealed that employees in China had access to U.S. user data, including “master admin “  permissions, which allowed them to access “everything. “  

In response to the report, TikTok  confirmed  that Chinese employees had access to U.S. user data. The company also  announced  changes to its data storage practices, saying U.S. user traffic is now routed through the American-based Oracle Cloud. TikTok  says  all user data is now stored in Singapore, Malaysia, and the U.S., not in China. 

In a 2023 legal filing with the San Francisco Superior Court, Yintao Yu, ByteDance’s former head of engineering in the U.S., further  claimed  that a special committee of the Chinese Communist Party embedded in the company had “superuser “  access, or “god credentials, “  which enabled them to view all data ByteDance collected, including data from U.S. TikTok users.

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Yu alleged that CCP officials have used this superuser access to monitor Hong Kong protesters and civil rights activists, tracking their locations and communications. The allegations were part of a wrongful termination lawsuit Yu filed against ByteDance.

In response, ByteDance dismissed the claims as “baseless, “  emphasizing that Yu made these allegations five years after being terminated from his position at the subsidiary Flipagram.

In May 2023, former employees revealed to the  Wall Street Journal  that TikTok was tracking users who had viewed LGBT-related content. The company responded by saying its algorithms were used to boost engagement and track interests, but not specifically one’s sexual identity. 

The possibility that Chinese government officials could have “superuser “  access or the ability to track users based on their sexual orientation presents real concerns. Yet, the most damning indictment against TikTok is that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has actually been caught using the platform to spy on American citizens in the past.

TikTok’s Spygate 

In October 2022,  Forbes  reported that ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control Department had used the TikTok app to surveil certain U.S. citizens in at least two instances. 

According to the report, while ByteDance’s Internal Audit team typically investigates potential misconduct by current or former employees, the U.S. citizens targeted in these instances had no employment ties with the company. The specifics of who was targeted or the reasons for their surveillance were not initially disclosed by Forbes.

TikTok promptly  refuted  the claims, asserting that its platform does not permit the “targeting” or tracking of U.S. citizens and criticized the Forbes report for lacking “rigor and journalistic integrity. “  

On Twitter, TikTok  stated , “Forbes chose not to include the portion of our statement that disproved the feasibility of its core allegation: TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from U.S. users, meaning TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested.”

However, less than two months later, TikTok had to  retract  its denials. The company acknowledged that an internal investigation found that employees in the U.S. and China had “improperly accessed “  the personal data of at least two American journalists. 

According to TikTok, four members of the ByteDance Internal Audit team accessed personal data, including I.P. addresses, of journalists from  BuzzFeed  and the  Financial Times  in an attempt to identify the sources behind the leaked audio recordings revealing Chinese employees had “superuser “  access to American users’ data.

TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter confirmed that ByteDance had fired the four employees responsible for the spying incident, calling their activity an “egregious misuse of their authority. “  

“The misconduct of these individuals, who are no longer employed at ByteDance, was an egregious misuse of their authority to obtain access to user data, “  Oberwetter  said  in a statement to CNN. “This misbehavior is unacceptable and not in line with our efforts across TikTok to earn the trust of our users.”

In early 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  launched  a criminal investigation into ByteDance’s surveillance of American journalists. Neither agency has provided any public updates on the investigation, which is  believed  to be ongoing. 

TikTok and the future of G lobal digital politics

While the evidence on the actual threat level posed by TikTok is inconclusive, the combination of isolated espionage incidents targeting journalists and the potential risk of the Chinese Communist Party accessing vast amounts of American user data has prompted legislative action.

Proponents of the “divest-or-ban “  Bill have also pointed to China’s  2017 National Intelligence Law , which requires all Chinese organizations and citizens to “support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts. “  Regardless of how pure ByteDance’s intentions are to protect user information, the company could still be forced to hand over user data or participate in intelligence activities on behalf of the PRC. 

If the Bill is passed by the Senate and signed into law, TikTok will have nine months to find a buyer acceptable to the U.S. government. If the company fails to comply, the app would be removed from app stores and become inaccessible on U.S. internet browsers, effectively phasing it out from the American market. The implications for TikTok are stark, threatening its operational viability in one of its largest markets.

Ultimately, the legislative efforts targeting TikTok are emblematic of broader issues in global digital politics and the challenge of balancing national security with free speech. 

As the Bill moves forward, it could set a precedent for how the U.S. handles security concerns related to foreign-owned social media platforms. Not all participants in the process are comfortable with the potential implications or the swift pace at which lawmakers are pushing to ban an entire social media platform.

“The answer to authoritarianism is not more authoritarianism, “   said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) following last week’s House vote. “The answer to CCP-style propaganda is not CCP-style oppression. Let us slow down before we blunder down this very steep and slippery slope.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter:   @LtTimMcMillan.   Tim can be reached by email:  [email protected]  or through encrypted email:   [email protected]  

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TikTok challenges U.S. ban in court, calling it unconstitutional

Bobby Allyn

TikTok's suit is in response to a law passed by Congress giving ByteDance up to a year to divest from TikTok and find a new buyer, or face a nationwide ban. Kiichiro Sato/AP hide caption

TikTok's suit is in response to a law passed by Congress giving ByteDance up to a year to divest from TikTok and find a new buyer, or face a nationwide ban.

TikTok and its parent company on Tuesday filed a legal challenge against the United States over a law that President Biden signed last month outlawing the app nationwide unless it finds a buyer within a year.

In the petition filed in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the company said the legislation exceeds the bounds of the constitution and suppresses the speech of millions of Americans.

"Banning TikTok is so obviously unconstitutional, in fact, that even the Act's sponsors recognized that reality, and therefore have tried mightily to depict the law not as a ban at all, but merely a regulation of TikTok's ownership," according to the filing.

The law, passed through Congress at lightning speed, which caught many inside TikTok off guard, is intended to force TikTok to be sold to a non-Chinese company in nine months, with the possibility of a three month extension if a possible sale is in play.

Yet lawyers for TikTok say the law offers the company a false choice, since fully divesting from its parent company, ByteDance, is "simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally," the challenge states. "And certainly not on the 270-day timeline required by the Act."

Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in technology regulations, said if TikTok loses this legal fight, it will likely shut down in the U.S.

"The problem for TikTok is that they have a parent company that has these obligation in China, but they're trying to live by free speech rules by the United States," Chander said in an interview. "The question is whether American courts will believe that that's even possible."

TikTok says law based on "speculative and analytically flawed concerns"

Lawmakers in Washington have long been suspicious of TikTok, fearing its Chinese owner could use the popular app to spy on Americans or spread dangerous disinformation.

But in the company's legal petition, lawyers for TikTok say invoking "national security" does not give the government a free pass to violate the First Amendment, especially, TikTok, argues, when no public evidence has been presented of the Chinese government using the app as a weapon against Americans.

Possible TikTok ban could be 'an extinction-level event' for the creator economy

According to the filing, the law is based on "speculative and analytically flawed concerns about data security and content manipulation — concerns that, even if grounded in fact, could be addressed through far less restrictive and more narrowly tailored means."

New DOJ Filing: TikTok's Owner Is 'A Mouthpiece' Of Chinese Communist Party

Constitutional scholars say there are few ways for the government to restrict speech in a way that would survive a legal challenge. One of those ways is if the government can demonstrate a national security risk. Also key, legal experts say, is the government showing the speech suppression was the least restrictive option on the table.

TikTok said Congress ignored less restrictive ways of addressing the government's national security concerns.

"If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down," the filing states. "And for TikTok, any such divestiture would disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community."

Since more than 90% of TikTok's users are outside of America, Georgetown's Chander said selling the U.S.-based app to a different owner would cannibalize its own business.

"You can't really create a TikTok U.S., while having a different company manage TikTok Canada," Chander said in an interview. "What you're doing essentially is creating a rival between two TikToks," he said. " It may be better to take your marbles out of the United States and hope to make money outside of the U.S., rather than sell it at a fire-sale price."

TikTok critics call app a 'spy balloon on your phone'

The filing sets off what could be the most important battle for TikTok. It has been fending off legal challenges to its existence since former President Trump first sought to ban the app through an executive order in the summer of 2020. That effort was blocked by federal courts.

Since then, Democrats and Republicans have shown a rare moment of unity around calls to pressure TikTok to sever its ties with ByteDance, the Beijing-based tech giant that owns the video-streaming app.

Trump's Ban On TikTok Suffers Another Legal Setback

Congress has never before passed legislation that could outright ban a wildly popular social media app, a gesture the U.S. government has criticized authoritarian nations for doing.

In the case of TikTok, however, lawmakers have called the app a "spy balloon on your phone," emphasizing how the Chinese government could gain access to the personal data of U.S. citizens.

Worries also persist in Washington that Beijing could influence the views of Americans by dictating what videos are boosted on the platform. That concern has only become heightened seven months before a presidential election.

Yet the fears so far indeed remain hypothetical.

There is no publicly available example of the Chinese government attempting to use TikTok as an espionage or data collection tool. And no proof that the Chinese government has ever had a hand over what TikTok's 170 million American users see every day on the app.

TikTok says it offers U.S. a plan that would shut app down if it violated agreement

TikTok, for its part, says it has invested $2 billion on a plan, dubbed Project Texas, to separate its U.S. operation from its Chinese parent company. It deleted all of Americans' data from foreign servers and relocated all of the data to servers on U.S. soil overseen by the Austin-based tech company Oracle.

While the plan was intended to build trust with U.S. lawmakers and users, reports surfaced showing that data was still moving between staff in California and Beijing.

In the filing on Tuesday, TikTok said it submitted an agreement to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which has been probing the app for five years, that would allow the U.S. to suspend TikTok if it violated terms set forth in a national security plan.

But, lawyers for TikTok say, the deal was swept aside, "in favor of the politically expedient and punitive approach," the petition states.

Mnuchin claims he will place a bid to buy TikTok, even though app is not for sale

Despite the new law giving TikTok the ultimatum of selling or being shut down, there are many questions around how the app could even be bought by another company or group of investors.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told NPR on Monday, he is planning to assemble a group of investors to try to purchase TikTok without the app's algorithm.

Mnuchin, who declined to answer additional questions, said in between sessions at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles that the proposal to buy the app is still in the works, but he would not say when it would be formally submitted.

One major obstacle in any possible sale of TikTok is a glaring problem: The app is not for sale.

TikTok Ban Averted: Trump Gives Oracle-Walmart Deal His 'Blessing'

Despite the new law in the U.S., ByteDance says it does not intend to let go of the service. Furthermore, winning the support of China would be necessary, and officials in Beijing are adamantly against any forced sale.

In 2020, amid the Trump administration's clamp down on the app, China added "content-recommendation algorithms" to its export-control list, effectively adding new regulations over how TikTok's all-powerful algorithm could ever be sold.

ByteDance, not TikTok, developed and controls the algorithm that determines what millions see on the app every day. The technology has become the envy of Silicon Valley, and no U.S. tech company has been able dislodge TikTok's firm hold on the short-form video market. Experts say key to its success is its highly engaging and hyper-personalized video-ranking algorithm.

The algorithm, which involves millions of lines of software code developed by thousands of engineers over many years, cannot be easily transferred to the U.S., even if China did allow it, TikTok's challenge states.

Lawyers for TikTok argue that "any severance [of the algorithm] would leave TikTok without access to the recommendation engine that has created a unique style and community that cannot be replicated on any other platform today."

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A TikTok Ban Won’t Fix Social Media

By Kyle Chayka

On April 24th, after years of talks about a TikTok ban, President Joe Biden committed to remaking the platform’s existence in the United States. A foreign-aid package that he signed into law, and that passed in the House and the Senate with strong majorities, included funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza, plus a bill that will force the digital platform to either sell itself to an American entity or be banned on a national level. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, now has about nine months to divest. In his remarks after signing the package, Biden didn’t directly refer to the social-media platform, though he did say that the foreign aid would “make America safer,” a notion that also helps explain the government’s reasoning on the TikTok ban.

Over the past several years, TikTok has become something of a symbol both of fears over China’s rise as a dominant international power and of concerns that social media as a whole is harming children . The existential threat posed by the new legislation is nothing new . In 2020, the company put forward an elaborate plan to give twenty per cent of its platform to Walmart and Oracle, which would have hypothetically insured the data’s security and the company’s independence from the Chinese government. That plan was eventually shelved, in 2021, owing to security concerns. Since then, however, the platform has only grown more popular among U.S. users, whom the company has tried to convert to activists on its behalf. Earlier this year, users in the U.S. who opened the app found a pop-up requesting that they “tell Congress what TikTok means to you,” along with a button to directly phone elected officials. The subsequent wave of angry and uninformed calls, recounted to Politico by lawmakers’ offices, may have actually encouraged legislators to act on the proposed ban. According to Politico , the chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, concluded that the calls “only exposed the degree in which TikTok can manipulate and target a message.” In other words, by trying to rally its supporters, the company had only proved that it was a propagandistic threat.

TikTok’s C.E.O., Shou Zi Chew, became something of a Gen Z-approved celebrity after he appeared in front of Congress in 2023. On the day Biden signed the new package, Chew made the company’s position clear in a polished TikTok video posted on its official account. The law was “a ban on you and your voice,” Chew said. He continued, “TikTok gives everyday Americans a powerful way to be seen and heard.” Chew’s statement hinted at what seems to be ByteDance’s legal strategy moving forward: an argument that getting rid of TikTok could amount to a violation of free speech . On Tuesday, the company sued the U.S. government, writing in its filing that preventing American citizens from accessing the app is “unconstitutional.” There are legal precedents for such a claim, among them a 2017 Supreme Court case, Packingham v. North Carolina, which struck down a state law banning a sex offender from Facebook. “A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen,” the former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. “One of the most important places to exchange views is cyberspace, particularly social media.”

But other hints from ByteDance about how it might respond to the new law don’t quite cast its position in impassioned First Amendment terms. According to Reuters , ByteDance would rather shut down its U.S. TikTok operation than sell it. The vaunted recommendation algorithm that controls TikTok’s “For You” feed is what makes the app unique and successful; ByteDance leverages the same technology across its many other businesses, including Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. As in any other international trade dispute, putting valuable technology in the hands of a competitor through a sale would be destabilizing. Meanwhile, TikTok’s U.S. audience reportedly only generated about thirteen per cent of ByteDance’s 2023 revenue. In that sense, forgoing the American market would be strategically preferable for ByteDance, and relatively trivial. TikTok is already banned outright in several countries, including India, and has survived just fine. (China itself blocks access to TikTok, not to mention Facebook and Instagram, in its own strategy of techno-nationalism.)

The TikTok algorithm is inextricable from the app, and the algorithm also seems to be what we are most afraid of. In both political speeches and in a portion of media headlines, it is depicted as something that could deliver Chinese propaganda to unwitting American teen-agers and allow a foreign government to track in great detail the behavior of our citizens. Unfortunately, there is already plenty of propaganda, misinformation, and international bot activity to be found on every other social platform, which will remain quite accessible to Americans in the face of any TikTok ban. The data generated anywhere on the Internet can be packaged and sold to foreign (or domestic) adversaries so long as it is tracked. Parents express concerns about their childrens’ addiction to TikTok, and yet YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, two U.S. products, aspire to be just as transfixing. TikTok has provided the template for the algorithmic, passive future of social-media consumption, and other tech companies have leaped to copy it. You can ban TikTok in America, but it is far too late to contain the habits it has unleashed. The U.S. ban makes most sense as a political stunt: bellicose actions against China are popular across the political spectrum, and the demographic most vocally upset by the threatened ban are those too young to vote.

One funny thing about TikTok is that, for all its ubiquity in the news cycle and in discourse about social media, many of the concerned parties know little about it. A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center found that only thirty-three per cent of American adults say that they “ever use” TikTok; in contrast, eighty-three per cent say they use YouTube and sixty-eight per cent say they use Facebook. The survey also indicated that the TikTok demographic dramatically skews younger: sixty-two per cent of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds say they ever use TikTok, whereas ten per cent of those aged sixty-five and older reported that they ever use it. According to another estimate, more than two-thirds of TikTok’s monthly active users in the U.S. are under thirty-five years old. The majority of millennials whom I encounter open the app rarely, if ever, and confess to not really knowing what it’s like or how it works, in part because of its entrenched reputation as an app for the youth. Admitting that you use it, as I do, sometimes feels like saying that you watch Saturday-morning cartoons.

This ignorance of TikTok reinforces its status as a bogeyman and makes it easier to blame for social media’s collective ills than the other apps on which Americans already spend so much of their time. TikTok’s intoxicating aspect is its feed, which draws users through an endless parade of content and seems to read their minds about what they want to see next. What is so addictive on the app is for the most part the same kind of banal Internet content that now exists everywhere else: unhinged monologues, repeatable choreography moves, “America’s Funniest Home Videos”-level stunts, and random shopping recommendations. (That last genre has spread rapidly through the platform as its executives have realized that e-commerce may be more lucrative than advertising.)

TikTok is not magic; it is not the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb controlled by one nation at the risk of another. If we want to understand its real risks, we would do better to disentangle the motives behind the U.S. ban. The direct influence of the Chinese government would be ameliorated somewhat by divorcing the app from ByteDance, if that is indeed a path accepted by its parent company, or by forbidding the app to function at all in the U.S. But, if the core concerns are digital-data surveillance and the targeting of individual users in ways that can manipulate or endanger them, then we have plenty of domestic threats to face first. ♦

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — TikTok — The Controversy Surrounding the Ban of TikTok

The Controversy Surrounding The Ban of Tiktok

• Categories: Effects of Social Media TikTok

About this sample

Words: 593 |

Published: Sep 6, 2023

Words: 593 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

The rise of tiktok, privacy concerns and data security, censorship and content regulation, the economic impact of a ban, conclusion: balancing act.

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TikTok is taking the US to court to stop its potential ban

• TikTok is suing the US government over its new law that forces a sale or ban of the app.
• The company has argued that the law violates its users' First Amendment rights.
• Experts said a legal fight weighing free speech against national-security interests is a coin toss.

TikTok promised to fight its potential ban in the US — and now the social-media giant has made it official.

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, sued the federal government on Tuesday to halt a nationwide ban on the app, according to a petition filed by the company on May 7.

The bill, which was bundled with foreign aid and signed into law by President Joe Biden on April 24, gives ByteDance nine months to a year to sell or spin off TikTok's American assets or face a ban from US app stores.

The legislation specifically mentioned TikTok and ByteDance but could affect other apps with ties to China, Russia, or other countries that the US considers foreign adversaries.

State and federal politicians have spent years trying to assert greater control over TikTok's US operations.

Politicians fear that ByteDance — which is headquartered in Beijing — could be compelled to share US user data with the Chinese Communist Party or run influence operations on its behalf.

TikTok has denied both these claims and the US government has yet to present formal evidence that either action has occurred.

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TikTok's legal arguments are based on the First Amendment, which says that Congress can't pass a law that inhibits free speech. TikTok argues in the suit that the bill — called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act — deprives the app's 170 million American users of their First Amendment rights.

TikTok also said in the petition that selling the app would be "simply not possible."

Legal scholars told Business Insider that well-articulated First Amendment arguments tend to prevail in court but Congress' national-security concerns could ultimately win out.

"The First Amendment is the trump card that basically allows you to prevail if you can plausibly make a First Amendment argument," G.S. Hans, an associate clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and associate director of its First Amendment Clinic, told BI. "National security also is a trump card, and the government often wins when it claims that. The question for me is, 'Which trump card does the court think is more valuable?'"

TikTok's case will be heard in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Matthew Schettenhelm, a senior litigation analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told BI that this appellate court tends to have deference to Congress on national-security issues.

"National security is pretty much at the top of the list of those things where the DC Circuit judges are going to tread very carefully before they interfere," Schettenhelm said. He estimated that the law had a 70% chance of surviving a legal challenge.

The US is not the first country to target TikTok because a Chinese company owns it. India banned the app in 2020 amid its geopolitical dispute with China.

TikTok referred BI to the petition when asked for comment.

May 7, 2024, 12:58 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with additional details.

Watch: TikTok could be banned in US after House vote

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Don’t Ban TikTok. Make an Example of It.

There is plenty the U.S. government could do to ensure that TikTok acts responsibly without getting rid of it altogether.

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By Kevin Roose

For a while, it seemed that TikTok might dodge the techlash. After all, what could be problematic about a short-form video app featuring a bunch of teenagers and 20-somethings doing choreographed dances , roller skating , hanging out in influencer mansions and cutting into photorealistic cakes ?

The answer turns out to be: Plenty.

In the past year, as it has become one of the most popular apps in the world, TikTok has accumulated many of the same problems that other large-scale social networks have. In addition to all the harmless Gen Z fun, there are TikTok conspiracy theories , TikTok misinformation and TikTok extremism . There are even activists using TikTok to influence our elections, including a network of teenagers and K-pop fans who claimed they used the app to sabotage President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Okla., last month by registering for tickets under false identities.

All of this might have been overlooked or forgiven, except for one fact. TikTok is owned by ByteDance , one of the largest tech companies in China.

TikTok’s Chinese ownership has become a subject of intense scrutiny by lawmakers, regulators and privacy activists in recent weeks. Mr. Trump is considering taking steps to ban the app in the United States. Companies including Wells Fargo, and government agencies including the Transportation Security Administration, have instructed their employees to delete TikTok from their work phones because of concerns that it could be used for surveillance or espionage.

In response to the mounting pressures, TikTok is wrapping itself in the American flag. The company has hired a small army of lobbyists in Washington, has brought in an American chief executive (the former Disney executive Kevin Mayer) and is reportedly exploring selling a majority stake in the company to American investors.

Jamie Favazza, a TikTok spokeswoman, said in a statement that in addition to the chief executive, the social network had an American as its chief information security officer and another as its head of safety.

“We’ve tripled the number of employees in the U.S. since the start of 2020,” she said, “with plans to hire 10,000 more people over the next three years in places like Texas, New York and Florida.”

There are legitimate concerns about a Chinese-owned company capturing the attention and data of millions of Americans — especially one like ByteDance, which has a history of bending the knee to the country’s ruling regime. Like all Chinese tech companies, ByteDance is required to abide by Chinese censorship laws, and it could be forced to give user data to the Chinese government under the country’s national security law. Lawmakers have also raised concerns that TikTok could be used to promote pro-China propaganda to young Americans, or censor politically sensitive content.

Ms. Favazza said TikTok stored American user data in Virginia and Singapore. She added that the company’s content moderation efforts were led by U.S.-based teams and not influenced by any foreign government, and that TikTok had not and would not give data to the Chinese government.

There are also reasons to be skeptical of the motives of TikTok’s biggest critics. Many conservative politicians, including Mr. Trump, appear to care more about appearing tough on China than preventing potential harm to TikTok users. And Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook, whose executives have warned of the dangers of a Chinese tech takeover, would surely like to see regulators kneecap one of their major competitors.

I’ll be honest: I don’t buy the argument that TikTok is an urgent threat to America’s national security. Or, to put it more precisely, I am not convinced that TikTok is inherently more threatening to Americans than any other Chinese-owned app that collects data from Americans. If TikTok is a threat, so are WeChat, Alibaba and League of Legends, the popular video game, whose maker, Riot Games, is owned by China’s Tencent.

And since banning every Chinese-owned tech company from operating in America wouldn’t be possible without erecting our own version of China’s Great Firewall — a drastic step that would raise concerns about censorship and authoritarian control — we need to figure out a way for Chinese apps and American democracy to coexist.

Here’s an idea: Instead of banning TikTok, or forcing ByteDance to sell it to Americans, why not make an example of it by turning it into the most transparent, privacy-protecting, ethically governed tech platform in existence?

As a foreign-owned app, TikTok is, in some ways, easier to regulate than an American tech platform would be. (One way of regulating it, a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States of ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, TikTok’s predecessor app, is already reportedly underway .) And there is plenty more the U.S. government could do to ensure that TikTok plays a responsible role in our information ecosystem without getting rid of it altogether. It could require the company to open-source key parts of its software, including the machine-learning algorithms that determine which posts users are shown. It could pressure TikTok to submit to regular audits of its data-collection practices, and open up its internal content moderation guidelines for public comment. As Kevin Xu, the author of Interconnected, a blog about United States-China relations, points out, ByteDance could impose strict internal controls to prevent its Chinese employees from accessing any of TikTok’s systems, and open-source those controls so that outsiders could verify the separation.

Samm Sacks, a cyberpolicy fellow at the centrist think tank New America, told me that some of the solutions being proposed for TikTok — such as selling itself to American investors — wouldn’t address the core problems. An American-owned TikTok could still legally sell data to third-party data brokers, for example, which could then feed it back to the Chinese authorities.

Instead, Ms. Sacks said, the American government should enact a strong federal privacy law that could protect TikTok users’ data without banning the app altogether.

“Let’s solve for the problems at hand,” she said. “If the concern is data security, the best way to secure the data is to put TikTok under the microscope, and put in place really robust and enforceable rules about how they’re using and retaining data.”

Forcing TikTok to operate in a radically transparent way would go a long way toward assuaging Americans’ fears. And it could become a test case for a new model of tech regulation that could improve the accountability and responsibility of not just Chinese-owned tech companies but American ones, too.

At its core, a lot of the TikTok fear factor comes down to a lack of information. In March, TikTok announced that it would open “transparency centers” where independent auditors could examine its content moderation practices. The company has also begun releasing “transparency reports,” similar to those issued by Facebook and Twitter, outlining the various takedown requests it gets from governments around the world.

But we still don’t know how TikTok’s algorithms are programmed, or why they’re showing which videos to which users. We don’t know how it’s using the data it’s collecting, or how it makes and enforces its rules. We should know these things — not just about TikTok, but about American social media apps, too.

After all, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat are playing a huge role in the lives of millions of Americans, and for years, they have operated with a degree of secrecy that few other companies of their importance have been allowed. What little we understand about these platforms’ inner workings is often learned years after the fact, gleaned from insider leaks or repentant former employees.

Some experts see TikTok’s current predicament as a chance to change that.

“I think TikTok is a bit of a red herring,” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer and a professor at Stanford University, told me in an interview. Ultimately, Mr. Stamos said, the question of what to do about TikTok is secondary to the question of how multinational tech giants in general should be treated.

“This is a chance to come up with a thoughtful model of how to regulate companies that operate in both the U.S. and China, no matter their ownership,” he said.

The debate over TikTok’s fate, in other words, should really be a debate about how all of the big tech companies that entertain, inform and influence billions of people should operate, and what should be required of them, whether they’re based in China or Copenhagen or California.

If we can figure out how to handle TikTok — an app with a genuinely creative culture , and millions of American young people who love it — we’ll have done a lot more than preserving a world-class time-waster. We’ll have figured out a model for getting big tech platforms under control, after years of letting them run amok.

Kevin Roose is a technology columnist for The Times. His column, "The Shift," examines the intersection of technology, business, and culture. You can find him on Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook , or Instagram . More about Kevin Roose

TikTok, creators challenge U.S. divest or ban law on First Amendment grounds

May 14 (UPI) -- TikTok's lawsuit against the U.S. government will task the federal court system with considering national security interests and First Amendment rights.

Legal experts tell UPI the argument by the social media company is the best it could make, but it is likely a losing argument.

TikTok parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit earlier this month, challenging what it calls an "unprecedented step" taken by Congress to either force the sale of the app or ban it in the United States.

The lawsuit alleged that the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is unconstitutional. It skirts the free speech rights of 170 million U.S. users without Congress showing a legislative finding that TikTok poses an actual threat to national security.

"Members of Congress and a congressional committee report merely indicate concern about the hypothetical possibility that TikTok could be misused in the future, without citing specific evidence," the lawsuit reads. "Even though the platform has operated prominently in the United States since it was first launched in 2017."

ByteDance, a Chinese-based company, claims that the United States is establishing a dangerous precedent by singling out TikTok, changing course from its history of supporting a "free and open internet."

"If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down," the lawsuit says.

Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told UPI that the argument by ByteDance is strong but he is not convinced it will win the day.

"It's the best argument they could make," he said. "There are 170 million people in the United States that use TikTok. All of that activity is presumptively protected speech. More likely than not, ultimately the Supreme Court will allow this to stand. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk."

Rozenshtein said that of the many First Amendment cases in history, one that may be the most relevant to this one is the United States vs. Humanitarian Law Project case in 2010. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold a law that prohibited organizations from providing material support or aid to foreign terrorists.

Rozenshtein added that TikTok has many cases it may draw from as well. However, he does not believe precedent weighs so heavily in this case.

Andrew Verstein, professor of law at UCLA, agreed that the court system will side with the interests of the government in the end.

"My gut says these arguments are all losers and that this divestiture can occur as Congress wants," Verstein told UPI.

Verstein explains that the First Amendment conflict can be avoided if ByteDance sells TikTok. He expects that second option will be key in unraveling the free speech argument.

"Here, with Congress having spoken, the question would only be would the Constitution prevent Congress from what it has purported to do?" Verstein said. "I'm pretty confident the Constitution doesn't prevent that."

ByteDance argues that it is not being given real options.

"They claim that the Act is not a ban because it offers ByteDance a choice: divest TikTok's U.S. business or be shut down. But in reality, there is no choice. The 'qualified divestiture' demanded by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally."

ByteDance adds that it is not possible to complete a sale in the 270-day timeline required by the act. It also argues that it has taken "extraordinary" measures to respond to Congress' concerns, including investing $2 billion to build a network to store U.S. user data in the United States.

These measures came as part of an agreement between TikTok and the U.S. government.

"Congress tossed this tailored agreement aside in favor of the politically expedient and punitive approach of targeting for disfavor one publisher and speaker, one speech forum and one speech forum's ultimate owner," the lawsuit says.

The national security interests of the U.S. government will be the primary defense of the act. But the government may also argue that forced divestiture is not unprecedented at all.

The United States has a long history of forcing the sale of assets or limiting ownership by foreign investors in various forms of media.

"Given that we have divestiture and limitation on ownership in other media environments, television, newspapers -- the fact that it would be really easy to maintain the First Amendment rights of all of these 170 million people if the company would just sell its assets," Verstein said. "And the fact that it won't do it because its government tells it not to, that doesn't strike me as the kind of argument that is going to hold sway."

A group of eight content creators filed a separate lawsuit on Tuesday, also on free speech grounds.

Their lawsuit argues that the act to ban TikTok is "unconstitutionally over-broad" because it bans an entire mode of communication. It also says this ban is not based on any evidence that TikTok is used to transmit foreign propaganda or is a threat to data security.

"The government cannot ban a medium for communication because it believes that medium is used to transmit foreign 'propaganda' or other protected content. Nor does the government have any actual, non-speculative evidence that banning TikTok in its current form enhances Americans' data security, or that its ban is narrowly tailored to accomplish that objective," the lawsuit says.

Norman Bishara, professor of business law and ethics in the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at Michigan, wrote in an email to UPI that he believes the ByteDance lawsuit will be the most comprehensive challenge to the legislation.

"Other similar litigation seems superfluous unless more issues come to light," Bishara wrote. "Still, with complex and high-stakes litigation like this there are always twists and turns with delays that could impact the timeline of a ban."

Bishara adds that while the lawsuits may fail to stop the ban or divestiture, they could still create some change to the act. They may also motivate other TikTok users to advocate for modifications to the act.

"The stakes for the outcome of these cases can reverberate beyond the fate of TikTok in the U.S. and can be seen as part of the story of what level of government intervention in trade, tech issues, and communications issues, which Americans are going to support or challenge," he said.