What to know about TikTok’s fate in the US

For years, murmurs of a US TikTok ban have left users and creators furious and terrified that a social media app that had become central to their lives could be taken away. Again and again, the ban never actually materialized, and users continued to enjoy what had, since 2018, become one of the most creative, vital, and paradigm-shifting developments in internet culture.

But this is no longer a “boy who cried wolf” situation. On Friday, the Supreme Court signaled that it would uphold the law signed by President Biden last April requiring TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to divest TikTok from its Chinese ownership or risk facing a ban in the US.

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President Joe Biden has signed a bill to ban TikTok, starting a nine-month countdown until the social media app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance will be forced to sell it or have it be removed from US app stores.

The proposed ban has generated furor on Capitol Hill — and online — since it first passed the House as a standalone bill last month.

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The Senate is now considering a bipartisan bill that could force a sale of TikTok, with the House having already passed a similar measure and President Joe Biden throwing his support behind it. If the legislation is signed into law — and if it survives likely legal challenges — the question then becomes: Who would buy TikTok?

The bill would require the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the social media platform within 165 days of the law going into effect or else the platform will be banned from US app stores.

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Since its introduction to the US in 2018, TikTok has been fighting for its right to exist. First, the company struggled to convince the public that it wasn’t just for preteens making cringey memes; then it had to make the case that it wasn’t responsible for the platform’s rampant misinformation (or cultural appropriation … or pro-anorexia content … or potentially deadly trends … or general creepiness, etc). But mostly, and especially over the past three years, TikTok has been fighting against increased scrutiny from US lawmakers about its ties to the Chinese government via its China-based parent company, ByteDance.

Montana became the first state to ban TikTok outright on May 17, when its governor, Greg Gianforte, signed the bill into law. The legislation doesn’t make it illegal to use TikTok. Rather, it fines platforms that distribute it, like Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The Montana law goes into effect at the beginning of 2024, assuming it survives the inevitable court challenges. At least one of those will come from TikTok, which sued the state days after the law was signed.

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There might be a new way to deal with TikTok in DC: a bipartisan bill from Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD) that isn’t a TikTok ban — though it could lead to one. It also doesn’t just address TikTok or its parent company, the Chinese-based ByteDance, but all technology companies from countries that have been identified as countries of concern.

“Today everybody’s talking about TikTok,” Warner said in a press conference announcing the bill. “But before there was TikTok there was Huawei and ZTE, and before that there was Russia’s Kaspersky Lab.”

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The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s much-hyped hearing on TikTok, featuring CEO Shou Chew, took place Thursday without many fireworks. But over the course of five hours, lawmakers grilled Chew not only about TikTok’s or his own links to China, but also issues that are common across all social media platforms, like the promotion of harmful content and the immense amount of data they collect about their users.

Members of the committee were almost uniformly critical of TikTok, but many — though not all — eschewed the grandstanding that has become more common at high-profile hearings like this. Instead, they asked Chew things that they actually seemed to want answers to.

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It’s been a difficult few weeks for TikTok. An agreement with a government interagency group that it was depending on, which would allow the Chinese-owned app to continue to operate in the US, seems to have fallen apart. Without it, President Biden will likely soon have to make a final decision about the app: demand a sell-off, and be ready to ban TikTok if its owner ByteDance won’t oblige.

TikTok’s future in the US has perhaps never been in more doubt than it is right now. The status quo — an impasse where TikTok operates as normal with the seemingly empty threat of a ban hanging over its head — won’t be tenable for much longer. But the choices that the US and ByteDance are left with don’t seem very tenable, either.

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It looks like the big bipartisan push against Big Tech in the new Congress will be about protecting kids. While antitrust and privacy efforts seem to be languishing for now, several child-focused online safety bills are being introduced this session. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has reportedly signaled that passing them is a priority for him. President Joe Biden recently said the same.

And they just might pass, if this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about protecting children online is any indication. Witnesses testified about how children are harmed by online content and the platforms that help push it to a largely friendly audience of senators, some of whom authored prominent child online safety bills in previous sessions. None have become law, but the new Congress seems intent on making it happen.

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I don’t remember the first time I saw one of Jeff Jackson’s TikTok videos, but I definitely remember the one that turned me into a follower.

The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives was in chaos. I was on the West Coast with my non-politically obsessed family and a friend, watching Republicans fail to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House 14 times over the course of four days. We weren’t just watching a historic fail unfold (the kind of embarrassment Congress hadn’t seen in a century). We were also seeing a confounding stalemate preventing the country from having a fully functioning government.

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The act of scrolling through your For You feed on TikTok might come with an additional sense of impending doom these days. After years of hand-wringing over the enormously popular app’s ties to China and the potential national security threat they present, it looks like someone is going to do something about it.

TikTok is grappling with an increasingly real prospect of being banned in the United States. This wouldn’t just be a mostly performative prohibition of installing the app on federal or state government-owned devices. It could also be more impactful than the legally questionable ban that former President Donald Trump tried and failed to enact in 2020.

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Among the many items tucked away in the $1.7 trillion spending bill Congress is working to pass to fund the government next year is a small victory for enemies of TikTok: Users of government-owned phones and devices will not be allowed to install the video app and must remove it if installed.

The move, championed by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, is mostly symbolic, my colleague Sara Morrison reported, since the app is already banned at a few agencies and departments, and would only apply to employees of the executive branch of government. “It doesn’t ban the app on phones of employees of other branches, like members of Congress or their staff,” she wrote. That means the handful of members of Congress, staffers, and interns who use the app to communicate with constituents or to share a behind-the-scenes look at how the federal legislature works may still be free to do so.

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If you’re a TikTok user, your For You page is about to get a little more transparent, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday morning. The announcement came several hours after federal lawmakers revealed the must-pass omnibus spending bill, which includes a provision that bans TikTok from some federally funded phones.

The two moves are representative of the difficult year TikTok has had in the US as it tries to reassure the federal government that it has no ties to nor is influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. A growing number of lawmakers are increasingly skeptical of TikTok, believing the China-based company that owns it, ByteDance, is indeed controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. That control could mean that the Chinese government might try to compel TikTok to give it data on US users, or that the Chinese government may force TikTok to push propaganda or misinformation to TikTok’s relatively young userbase through the For You feed, which effectively serves as the app’s homepage.

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Here’s something you rarely hear a Democratic senator say: “Donald Trump was right.”

But that’s what Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) is saying now, and it’s all because of TikTok, the popular video app that Trump tried to ban in the waning months of his presidency.

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It’s official: Biden has reversed Trump’s executive order banning TikTok in the United States, bringing to a close a period of uncertainty over the immediate fate of the wildly popular social media app. But TikTok’s problems with the US government are far from over.

On Wednesday morning, Biden issued an executive order that revoked Trump’s prior executive order banning TikTok over national security concerns. (Trump’s order never actually went into effect because US courts struck it down.) Biden’s executive order also called for a broader US government review of all apps with ties to “a foreign adversary,” like China. This means that TikTok and other Chinese-affiliated companies could potentially face more restrictions in the future if they’re found to prove a risk to the United States’ economy or national security.

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Remember when the Trump administration thought TikTok was a grave threat to America?

No?

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On August 6, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting transactions with the video-sharing app TikTok. Since the app is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance, it could pose national security and privacy risks to users in the US, the order states.

But the Trump administration’s actions targeting TikTok mark a departure from the traditional American techno-libertarian position on internet governance and free speech online. And it comes at a time when the concept of a global internet is under threat.

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TikTok was never supposed to be political. When it launched in the US in 2018, the video app was marketed as a fun place to discover goofy content and experiment with its sophisticated editing software and vast music library. Yet nearly two years and 165 million nationwide downloads later, TikTok has been a platform for teachers strikes, QAnon conspiracy theories, Black Lives Matter protests, and a teen-led campaign to sabotage a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The TikTok algorithm is perfectly suited to spread political content faster and to a wider audience than any social media app in history, whether the company wants to admit it or not.

Now TikTok is proving itself to be political in a much broader way, one that challenges the very existence of the app. White House officials are talking seriously about attempting to ban it (how the government would choose to do so is less clear) in the wake of rising tensions with China, where TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is based.

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