If reports are to be believed, the United State’s back and forth with China-based social media platform TikTok appears to have reached its boiling point. On the 20th of April, the House passed legislation that banned the app in the U.S. if its China-based owner failed to sell off its stake within this year. The U.S. government typically likes to leave companies alone – which is why the speed at which the law was passed through Congress stands out. An earlier version of the bill, which had only allowed a sell-by deadline of six months had stalled, before the new version, which extends the grace period to nine months, with the potential of a three-month extension if a sale is currently underway.
The law is said to reflect bipartisan concerns about the potential threat that ByteDance Ltd., TikTok’s parent company poses to America’s national security. Such was this concern that the House Republicans included the TikTok law in a foreign aid policy aid package expressing congressional support for Ukraine and Israel that had received priority status from President Biden. However, this ban may not be as immediate as one might suppose. TikTok insists that it’s not going to be chased off without a fight, which means that the legislation is likely to be met with contention in the courts. Addressing platform users through a TikTok video, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew even said, “We will not stop fighting and advocating for you. We will continue to do all we can, including exercising our legal rights, to protect this amazing platform that we have built with you.”
The social media platform did put up a fight together with lobby groups through the legislative process, going as far as urging its 170 million— mostly young—U.S. users to voice their opposition to Congress by calling in. This however appears to only have spurred on lawmakers to act faster. The average age of the lawmakers of Capitol Hill isn’t exactly among the target demographic, which may be why Shou Zi Chew’s statement failed to appeal to their sympathies. Despite the security concerns that are fuelling this urgency, the U.S. government is yet to provide evidence of TikTok actually leaking U.S.-based user data to the Chinese government. No evidence reflects that China may be tweaking the algorithm that personalises individual for-you pages for the U.S. in particular. ByteDance potentially manipulating U.S. audiences toward internalising content favourable to its interests has always been an area of specific concern to policymakers.
TikTok may not be unfounded in its belief that it had legal grounds to oppose the ban against it. It certainly has legal precedent to it: in 2023, a federal court judge blocked a similar ban in Montana. In his judgement, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy found that the ban “oversteps state power and infringes on the Constitutional right of users and businesses.” In granting the preliminary injunction to stop the ban temporarily, he also noted that the singling out of a Chinese company for purported foreign influence was peculiar: “Despite the state’s attempt to defend (the law) as a consumer protection bill, the current record leaves little doubt that Monatana’s legislature and Attorney General were more interested in targeting China’s ostensible role in TikTok than with protecting Montana consumers.”
The federal court judge’s statement raises an important point about the latest ban as well. The singling out of a China-based social media platform is conspicuous, when other social media platforms exist, especially considered in light of heightening tensions in the race for the tech economy between the two countries. Given the existence of broader federal laws that safeguard digital data and the privacy rights of consumers, the ban becomes much harder to justify. The concerns of the U.S. Congress cannot be dismissed out of hand since China has its own laws that allow the government to access the information held by private companies to further its national interests. Moreover, users consent to these policies when they tap ‘yes’ on TikTok’s user agreement.
For what it’s worth, on the 24th of April President Biden signed off on the new law that would ban TikTok. If all goes well (from the point of U.S. lawmakers), TikTok will be inaccessible to U.S. users from 2025 onwards. If not, it will be because ByteDance took the U.S. government to court.
(Theruni Liyanage)