Utsav Gandhi relates recent developments in the American government’s ban on TikTok and shows how the case maps over broader debates about conflicts between the political goals of national security, freedom of speech, and competition policy.
“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It’s an attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-Tac-Toe. A winner,” said United States Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in a speech on the House floor in March 2024.
“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) asked TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a marathon Senate hearing on online child safety the month before. Chew replied, “Senator, I’m Singaporean.” Cotton pushed again, “Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?” Chew, who lives in Singapore with his wife and children, who are American, responded, “No, senator. Again, I’m Singaporean!”
“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won [the] youth by 34 points, and there are those that say that TikTok had something to do with it,” said President-elect Donald Trump on December 17, 2024. (Young voters aged 18-29 preferred Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris 52% to Trump’s 46% share.)
Ever since the U.S. federal government first announced in 2020 during Trump’s first term that it was considering banning the Chinese-owned social media platform on the grounds of national security, TikTok’s story of survival and now near-demise has undergone various twists, as the positions of Pelosi, Cotton, and Trump demonstrate. The most recent development came on January 17, two days before the ban is scheduled to go into effect, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of upholding the government’s ban on TikTok unless ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, divests the app. (TikTok itself is legally incorporated in the U.S.) To understand why TikTok now nears extinction in the U.S., one must parse the thicket of interests and concerns that propelled its ban. This saga intersects political economy, nationalism, data privacy, and a general concern over the effects of social media screen time and algorithms on our society, especially on children.
TikTok has come a long way from its early days when it was known better for trendsetting dance videos. The app has grown enormously, not just among the youth: From 2021-2023, the share of U.S. adults who use TikTok increased from 21% to 33%. Today, it is a significant news source, especially for younger and more diverse audiences. As Trump indicated in his comment above, TikTok is also a crucial platform for political outreach. It also presents a significant economic opportunity. According to ZipRecruiter data, as of January 4, 2025, the average annual pay for a TikTok content creator in the U.S. is $131,874.
Perhaps just as important, TikTok offers content creators a competitive alternative for monetization beyond Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology permanently blocked access to TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps over alleged security concerns in January 2021 after first restricting access to the apps in June 2020. While official data is unavailable, both private sector analyses and platform responses indicate—as might be expected—that the TikTok ban has benefited the incumbent position of Meta’s Instagram and Google/Alphabet’s YouTube Shorts. This raises similar antitrust concerns in the U.S. Indeed, reports have emerged that Meta paid a Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok’s image. Meta also shattered a lobbying record at the same time when the U.S. House first passed the ban, with reports suggesting the two were connected.
Despite the app’s popularity, political and journalistic importance, and economic benefit—or because of it—TikTok has been banned as a national security threat.
TikTok and the priority of national security
There are two main reasons that TikTok has been banned. First, TikTok collects data on American citizens that the app’s detractors allege are readily fed to the Chinese government. Second, there are concerns that the same Chinese government could use the app and this data to spread propaganda among American audiences.
TikTok said it completed the migration of all U.S. user data to Oracle-hosted servers in June 2022. However, some signs indicate that concerns about the first reason are still valid. In December 2022, four employees at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, were found to have improperly accessed the location and personal data of two journalists on the platform. ByteDance has since fired those employees. Although not concerning American citizens, a whistleblower also revealed that the Chinese government had accessed TikTok data to spy on Hong Kong citizens protesting the Chinese Communist Party in 2018.
There is also some justification for the latter reason: The Chinese government is using TikTok to expand its global influence operations to promote pro-China narratives and undermine U.S. democracy, according to a report released in March 2024 by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Other social media companies, including Meta, have also reported that foreign adversaries like China use their platforms for influence campaigns.
China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law obligates “Chinese individuals, institutions, and organizations” to assist or cooperate with state intelligence work. A separate 2014 Counter-Espionage Law (and its 2021 update) mandates Chinese individuals cooperate with national security agencies. This is why ByteDance’s Chinese ownership is the flashpoint at the heart of this debate, why the ban’s proponents believe that TikTok is susceptible to the Chinese government’s demands, and why it could be easy for the Chinese Communist Party to access TikTok data.
These fears don’t seem to be shared by all American consumers. The days following the Supreme Court hearings in early January to ban TikTok saw a massive surge of U.S. users flocking to other Chinese TikTok alternatives, such as RedNote and Xiaohongshu, with “tiktokrefugee” becoming a trending topic online.
Further, not all American national security experts side with the government. Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel to the National Security Administration and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, has stated that a TikTok ban would be bad policy and precedent. He says banning TikTok on government-owned devices makes sense because of the risks of exposing state secrets. However, he notes that the case has not been made that data from the general American public offers the Chinese government any strategic value. Gerstell concludes that the ban only hurts America’s international standing as a champion of openness and freedom.
Senators from both parties have said that the public should get access to at least some of the sensitive information that U.S. agencies shared at closed-door classified intelligence briefings about the influence and reach of TikTok. This echoes much of the sentiment expressed by the academic and civic community that the U.S. government should be more transparent with users about TikTok’s actual security risks.
Other experts have repeatedly stressed that the U.S. data privacy challenge is much broader than TikTok, applies to all social media giants—including American ones—and requires far more comprehensive national data privacy legislation. A report from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy found that via data brokers, it is “not difficult to obtain non-public, individually identified, and sensitive data, such as health data, financial data, and information about religious practices,” noting that location data is also widely and legally available for purchase. If the Chinese government truly wants American citizens’ data, there are other ways to access them.
TikTok and the protection of free speech
Contraposed to the national security and data privacy reasons for and against banning TikTok are concerns that a ban would violate freedom of speech and reduce competition in a critical market providing news and information to American citizens.
Facing the deadline of January 19—the final day of Joe Biden’s term as president and when the ban will go into effect—for ByteDance to either divest TikTok, the U.S. arm of its operations or shut it down entirely, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for and against the “ban” on January 10. How the ban would proceed in practice is an open question. It would likely remain on the phones of the millions who have downloaded it but would fail to receive updates, thus eventually rendering it worthless. Further, the legislation imposes a $5,000 fine on Google and Apple for every new user who downloads TikTok from their mobile app stores after the ban. As such, Google and Apple will likely make TikTok unavailable. There is no reason for Google, in particular, to prop up a competitor (to its YouTube Shorts) at a financial cost to itself.
Although the U.S. government has pushed to ban TikTok on national security grounds, the company’s defense before the Supreme Court rested on the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. TikTok’s attorney, Noel Francisco, argued that TikTok, Inc. is a U.S. subsidiary operating and speaking in the U.S. (via its algorithm, which he clarified in response to Justice Amy Coney Barrett includes a “lot of things,” including editorial discretion and moderation settings). He said the ban would burden TikTok’s speech, so the First Amendment applies.
Specifically, Francisco argued that the ban is not about ownership but rather the content that TikTok platforms, as the ban only applies to social media with user-generated content. He noted that German-owned POLITICO and Al-Jazeera, which the government of Qatar partly owns, are other media companies allowed to operate in the United States. Or, he said, consider the hypothetical that China took Jeff Bezos hostage to force their coverage on the publication he owns, The Washington Post. The Court could not force the Post to do anything but disclose the coercion.
In conclusion, Francisco argued the ban singles out the firm and its users for unfair treatment. He further argued that the government has no constitutional interest in preventing foreign propaganda: The “fear that Americans, even if fully informed, could be persuaded by Chinese misinformation” does not trump the First Amendment protections of free speech and violates guiding American principles that respect the autonomy of its adult citizens (including the right to listen to or receive speech).
Francisco conceded that a long-standing tradition exists in the U.S. of resistance to foreign media ownership. However, he argued that the distinction is that while the U.S. government feared foreign entities dominating the U.S. media market in the past, that fear cannot apply to the digital economy where there are no technological restrictions. If it is applied, then “[t]here’s really no limiting principle,” he said. “There’s no reason why it wouldn’t also apply to really popular books or magazines or newspapers or chains of newspapers.” The government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, later clarified, “the historical record that in choosing to limit foreign control of radio and broadcast stations, Congress specifically cited a concern about national security.”
Francisco also disputed that ByteDance has “ultimate control” over TikTok and can thus influence its content to favor Chinese government narratives or access its data.TikTok is owned by TikTok LLC, a limited liability company incorporated in Delaware and based in Culver City, California, and has never existed in mainland China, where a sister app called Douyin exists instead. However, TikTok LLC is controlled by TikTok Ltd, which is registered in the Cayman Islands and based in Shanghai. That firm is, in turn, ultimately owned by ByteDance Ltd, also incorporated in the Cayman Islands and based in Beijing.
As Chief Justice John Roberts identified, much of the debate hinges on the corporate structure of TikTok and how much independence it has from ByteDance. If, as Justice Samuel Alito theorized, China owned TikTok entirely or TikTok couldn’t do anything without Chinese control, would the ban be less controversial? The Supreme Court has never held that foreign governments hold free speech rights. Why should that change because of a corporate structure? In this case, TikTok is a “bonafide U.S. company, not simply a Chinese cutout that is the Chinese government speaking itself,” Francisco replied.
Overall, the saga illustrates the complex interplay of national security concerns—some public, some confidential—and contemporary capitalism in a globalized market. The outgoing Biden administration—an enabler of the TikTok ban—has propped up industrial policy reshoring supply chains and companies for both job growth and in the name of national security. Governments everywhere are struggling to reformulate national security policies in an era of globalization. Can national security—and, in this case, free speech—still thrive if its most impactful companies have vulnerabilities elsewhere?
TikTok: American Political Economy 101?
In a summer 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center, 32% of adults said they would support the U.S. government banning TikTok, down from 50% in March 2023. Another 28% said they opposed a ban, while 39% were unsure. But voter preference may only have a bit role in determining TikTok’s ultimate fate.
What might have a larger role is an element of special interest capture. Trump has a close relationship with Jeff Yass, a billionaire Wall Street financier and Republican megadonor with significant investments in both ByteDance and the shell company that recently merged with Trump’s social media company. Trump could direct his attorney general not to enforce the ban (though this would set a dangerous precedent) and publicly claim credit for trying to save it. He also asked the Supreme Court to pause the law so he could pursue a “political resolution” to the issue, though the Court did not heed his request.
There are several parties interested in purchasing TikTok if ByteDance chooses to divest. Frank McCourt, founder of Project Liberty and executive chairman of McCourt Global, is organizing a bid to place “people and data empowerment at the center of the platform’s design and purpose.”
However, ByteDance has repeatedly said that it will not sell or divest TikTok—which means the app will become effectively useless on the 19th and stay that way for the immediate future. This will conclude a muddled, chaotic, and instructive saga illustrating the various aspects of American political economy and the re-emergence of national security concerns as economic policy in the post-Covid era.
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Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
