High-level bipartisan calls to ban the social media app TikTok seem to have mostly faded from serious political discourse. The topic has gone from detailed proposals in the executive and legislative branches a year or so ago to occasional sound bites among candidates for the presidential Republican nomination.
The push to ban the country’s fourth most popular social media platform centers on national security concerns and runs in two directions of data flow. The first concern is that the Chinese Communist Party may force the company to recommend propaganda that’s anti-United States or pro-China to impressionable American users. Critics of the ban point out that propaganda falls under free speech protections and that censoring it contradicts American principles. Pravda, the daily newspaper of the Soviet Union, was translated into English for American audiences starting in the mid-1980s.
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The other concern runs in the opposite data direction: The Chinese government may have access to American users’ information gathered from the app and eventually use that material for nefarious purposes. The Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is subject to a Chinese national security law that requires it to turn over data to government authorities on request. But data experts have pointed out that the U.S. government often obtains American citizens’ data through apps, online advertising, data brokers, and government contractors and that China could do the same from other apps, even if TikTok were outlawed.
One explanation for the recent political inertia to ban the app may be the public’s lagging interest in doing so. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that enthusiasm for banning TikTok fell from 50% of U.S. adults in March 2023 to only 38% this past fall. Pew found only 18% of respondents aged 13-17 supported a government ban on the platform.
In an election year, politicians might not want to risk alienating voters, especially younger ones who are most enthusiastic about using TikTok for socialization, entertainment, and as a news source. As of the fall of 2023, the app has 143 million users in the U.S., more than 40% of the total population. The company reported that almost 5 million small U.S. businesses have TikTok accounts.
TikTok’s problems in the U.S. started in former President Donald Trump's administration. Trump issued an executive order calling for the sale of TikTok from its Chinese-based parent company to a U.S. owner. Trump attempted to broker a sale to Microsoft, arguing that "the United States Treasury would have to benefit also" but did not detail how that would happen. The deal fell apart by September 2020, and a federal court invalidated the executive order mandating its sale. Trump left office before the TikTok matter was resolved.
President Joe Biden's administration continued the opposition to TikTok but has been similarly unable to ban the app from most people's phones. Congress did pass legislation banning the app on federal government devices, and Biden signed that measure into law in December 2022. Early in 2023, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the RESTRICT Act that would grant new authority to the White House and the Commerce Department to ban technologies emanating from six countries, including China, deemed U.S. adversaries. Biden supported passing the bill, but it has stalled on Capitol Hill over legal concerns.
Those First Amendment concerns recently spelled failure for a Montana law that outlawed the app outright for state residents when a court found the measure unconstitutional.
“Banning an entire communications platform is an extreme measure, and to do so based on speculative harms cannot be squared with the First Amendment — especially when the legislature ignored other, more prevalent and proven causes of those harms,” Ari Cohn, free speech counsel of TechFreedom, a nonpartisan tech think tank, told the Washington Examiner.
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If other states or federal lawmakers want to ban the app in 2024, they will have to address those constitutional hurdles.
“Many warned the Montana legislature that the bill was unconstitutional, but instead of taking their jobs as legislators seriously, they forged ahead and wasted taxpayer money, losing this lawsuit," Cohn said. "Other states should pay attention and not repeat Montana's mistake.”