Olivia Telecky-
On July 31st, 2020, President Donald Trump responded to allegations that he wanted to ban TikTok, the popular social media app, saying “We’re looking at TikTok, we may be banning TikTok. . . We are looking at a lot of alternatives in respect to TikTok.” On August 3rd of that year, he went further and explained that the only way to save TikTok was for an American company to buy it. Trump even set a deadline, promising that “It’ll close down on September 15th [of 2020] unless Microsoft or somebody else is able to buy it and work out a deal.” As we now know, September came and went, and no ban was ever enacted.
That doesn’t mean Trump didn’t attempt to ban the app. He did sign two separate executive orders that would ban TikTok, but these were swiftly blocked by the federal courts. While these orders didn’t come to fruition, they did spark a conversation about the potential hazards of the ByteDance subsidiary. This conversation came to a head on March 23rd, 2023 with a Congressional Hearing where TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified for over five hours on how TikTok is addressing the safety allegations. In this hearing, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers claimed that TikTok collects “every data point imaginable”, including GPS data, biometric data, what users type and copy on their devices, and who users communicate with. According to Rodgers, TikTok is able to track Americans through many different websites, even if they have never used the app, stating that “TikTok surveils us all”, and that the Chinese Communist Party uses this surveillance to influence American elections.
The threat of influence was another main talking point of the hearing, with Representative Frank Pallone arguing that misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech are prevalent on the app, with “20% of TikTok search results on prominent news topics contain[ing] misinformation”. Because TikTok is so popular with Americans- specifically with teenagers, as ⅔ of them used TikTok at the time- this negative influence is widespread. As such, many politicians began to view TikTok as a threat.
However, CEO Shou Chew rebuked some of these claims. Specifically, he emphasized the fact that TikTok is a private company, not controlled by China or the Chinese Communist Party. He clarified that 60% of TikTok is owned by global institutional investors, 20% is owned by the owner, and 20% is owned by TikTok employees globally. TikTok also had five board members at the time, three of which were American. The app has also taken extra steps to increase the security of American data, according to Shou Chew, by building a firewall to protect it from foreign access, moving to store it locally in America, and creating a new company, called TikTok US Data Security, which reports TikTok’s data privacy efforts to individual Americans with strong security credentials. Shou Chew also stated that a large portion of TikTok users are over the age of 18 and that misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech are against community guidelines, and videos containing those are removed.
Concerns were not eliminated after this hearing, and in 2024 Congress passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. In the act, any company controlled by a foreign adversary will be banned in the U.S. According to the act, “The term “controlled by a foreign adversary” means “an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in subparagraph (A) [Citizens of Iran, Russia, China, or North Korea] directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake.” For any apps that meet this description, distributing, maintaining, or allowing them to use U.S. internet connection will be prohibited. The Supreme Court upheld this act and it was to go into effect on January 19th, 2025.
This ban did take effect, but only for a few hours. Why? Because President-elect Trump promised an executive order that would allow the app to be operated in the U.S. Or, at least, this is what was told to American citizens. However, this explanation doesn’t make much sense. For one, a promised executive order has no actual legal weight. Further, Trump was the one who called for a ban in the first place. However, a large part of his ban was that it could stay legal if TikTok was sold to an American company. This is where the truth behind the ban lies.
Trump never wanted to ban TikTok; he wanted a singular rich American or a rich American company to own it. When signing the promised order on January 20th of this year, Trump told the press “I’ll tell you what, every rich person has called me about Tiktok.” He also emphasized his idea that the U.S. should own half of TikTok. When asked about the security risk of the app, Trump responded “Tiktok is largely about kids, young kids, and if China is gonna get information about young kids I don’t really, I think, to be honest with you, I think we have bigger problems than that,” proving that safety is not his main motive.
An interesting aspect of the executive order is that it states “The unfortunate timing of section 2(a) of the Act — one day before I took office as the 47th President of the United States — interferes with my ability to assess the national security and foreign policy implications of the Act’s prohibitions before they take effect. This timing also interferes with my ability to negotiate a resolution to avoid an abrupt shutdown of the TikTok platform while addressing national security concerns.” The need for time to deliberate is questionable since Trump seemed to have made up his mind in 2020 when he attempted to enact a ban himself. It seems less like Trump is unsure of a ban, and more like he is trying to pressure the company to sell so one of the previously mentioned rich people calling him can make a profit. Either way, it seems wrong to praise Trump for blocking a ban that he created in the first place.