Whether or not you use the app, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about the “TikTok ban.” It’s true: President Biden signed the legislation into law on Wednesday, following an unusual bipartisan effort in both chambers of Congress. How did we get here, and is TikTok really going away for good?
A very brief history of TikTok
TikTok hasn’t always been TikTok. The app so many Americans know and love started out life as Musical.ly, an app designed for sharing 15-second lip-syncing videos. Musical.ly survived in this form from 2014 until 2018, when its new owner, ByteDance, rebranded the app to TikTok.
Since the rebrand, the app has absolutely exploded in popularity around the world, especially in the U.S. According to ByteDance, the app has had a 1,239.29 percent user base increase between 2018 and 2023. That’s 11.2 million to over 150 million. What started as an app for young adults to send lip sync videos to their friends transformed seemingly overnight into an entertainment revolution.
TikTok was ByteDance’s second video app venture: Its first, Douyin, is, to this day, a Chinese-exclusive app. In many ways, Douyin is a close cousin to TikTok: Users scroll through vertical videos delivered to them via an addictive algorithm. Like TikTok, Douyin relies on advertising and shopping to drive profits. However, contrary to what you might think, Douyin is really ByteDance’s main source of revenue, accounting for about 80 percent of the company’s $54 billion takings in the first half of last year. TikTok, which is massively popular all over the world, accounted for the other 20 percent.
Why is TikTok a security threat?
Sure, TikTok is popular, but plenty of other apps are popular as well. Why would the U.S. government single out TikTok, rather than, say, any of Meta’s products (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) or something like Snapchat, plenty of which have Americans addicted? In short, the Chinese government.
ByteDance is a Chinese-based company, and, as such, must comply with China’s corporate laws. These regulations are quite heavy-handed: For example, not only does the Chinese government have a party branch inside ByteDance, which is standard protocol for the country, but it also has a seat on the company’s board. On top of that, certain laws, especially the 2017 National Intelligence Law, compels companies to share data with the Chinese government, and to hide the fact they’re doing so.
So, lawmakers and intelligence agencies are concerned American user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government. TikTok, like most social media apps, collects a lot of data, including names, addresses, email addresses, IP addresses, contacts, messages, location data, platform usage, etc. While everyone from Meta to Snapchat collects similar information, they aren’t based in another country with complicated, at-times adversarial geopolitical differences.
From here, there are also fears TikTok is manipulating the content American viewers see. Yes, some lawmakers are very much concerned about how TikTok has delivered videos on the war between Israel and Hamas, which has led some users to believe the government dislikes the lack of control of the narrative in this case. But the TikTok problem goes beyond that: Remember Douyin? The Chinese government is very strict about the content it allows to be shown to children and teenagers, with a focus on more educational content. While few are calling for TikTok to censor all non-educational content for users under 18, the existing model of manipulation poses a concern for how TikTok could, theoretically, shape what American users see for the advantage of the Chinese government.
A timeline of the TikTok ban
U.S. government officials have had public concerns about TikTok as a national security threat since at least 2019. At that time, TikTok had banned an account from a user in New Jersey: The user claimed they were banned after posting about the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uyghurs, while TikTok claimed the ban was for unrelated reasons, and the video in question was taken down because of a “human moderation error.” Lawmakers also had concerns about how TikTok could potentially share American users’ data with the Chinese government, though there was no known breach of data at that time.
In 2020, the app landed in the crosshairs of the Trump administration: In an executive order, Trump gave ByteDance two choices: Sell TikTok to an American company, or see the app banned in the U.S. (Sound familiar?) At that time, Microsoft was in talks to buy the app, but Oracle came out as the chosen partner to take the lead. No sale happened in the end, however: The courts blocked the executive order in December of 2020, so ByteDance was off the hook.
But Oracle still had a role to play: In 2022, through Project Texas, TikTok started passing all U.S. user data through Oracle servers, as Oracle reviewed TikTok algorithms and moderation policies looking for any evidence of tampering or interference from the Chinese government. But 2022 wasn’t the year TikTok earned favor with the U.S. government: In the same year Project Texas rolled out, ByteDance employees scraped the TikTok accounts of American journalists to obtain their IP addresses. The company was looking for sources of ByteDance leaks reported on by these targeted journalists.
In December of 2022, the Biden administration banned TikTok from federal devices, months before TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress, a chaotic scene that made lawmakers look wildly out of touch and aloof, undermining certain legitimate concerns:
Despite Shou Zi Chew’s best efforts to depict TikTok as disconnected from the Chinese government, we learned in July of 2023 that, indeed, some U.S. user data is stored in China. This data pertained to creators that get paid for the content they post, rather than average TikTok users, but still, TikTok stored information from those creators, like social security numbers and tax forms, in China. That year, ۳۹ states followed the Biden administration’s lead in banning TikTok from government devices. Montana even tried to ban the app from the state entirely, but a judge blocked that ban in December of last year.
When the House of Representatives started getting serious about possibly cracking down on TikTok, the company panicked. Chew posted a plea on the platform, asking users to reach out to their congresspeople in support of saving the app. TikTok fans, predictably, flooded Congress with phone calls. According to The New York Times, this scared the shit out of lawmakers—not because they thought they were doing the wrong thing, but because it showed how much influence TikTok had over its users. The campaigned backfired, and actually sped up legislation.
Following years of debate and discussion, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would force ByteDance to divest its stake in the app to an American-based company, tying the legislation to a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza. The House passed the bill by a vote of 352-65, in a rare bipartisan agreement. And while the bill’s fate in the Senate was far from certain, that chamber also passed the bill in a bipartisan effort in April. The President quickly signed it into law, focused mostly on the international aid.
So, is TikTok dead in the U.S.?
No. In fact, its fate is far from certain. What we know is that you can continue to binge TikTok to your heart’s content until at least January of 2025: While the House’s original bill forced ByteDance to sell or be banned within six months, the Senate extended that timeline to nine months. President Biden also has the option to extend things by 90 days if it seems ByteDance is meaningfully working on selling. So, no matter what, this won’t be a problem until next year.
That means the app will be very much in play for the 2024 elections. We will have to see how that plays out, and how TikTok influences (or doesn’t influence) voters’ opinions as we hurl towards November. If TikTok is the national security threat the government thinks it is, it’ll be one hell of an election season. The videos will no doubt be spicy leading up to a potential January exit.
But TikTok won’t have to leave the U.S. if ByteDance sells to an American company. So far, ByteDance has signaled it won’t sell, but if it wanted to, it has it choices. Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is interested in buying TikTok, as are former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and investor Kevin O’Leary. Perhaps Oracle will make a bid, or Microsoft, but nothing is certain.
Don’t be so quick to write up TikTok’s obituary quite yet.
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