Welcome to the TikTok Meltdown
So: You’ve decided to force a multibillion-dollar technology company with ties to China to divest from its powerful social-video app. Congratulations! Here’s what’s next: *awful gurgling noises*
Yesterday evening, the Senate passed a bill—appended to a $95 billion foreign-aid package—that would compel ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within about nine months or face a ban in the United States. President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, initiating what is likely to be a rushed, chaotic, technologically and logistically complex legal process that is likely to please almost no one.
The government’s case against TikTok is vague. Broadly speaking, the concern from lawmakers —offered without definitive proof of any actual malfeasance—is that the Chinese government can use TikTok, an extremely popular broadcast and consumption platform for millions of Americans, to quietly and algorithmically promote propaganda, potentially meddling in our nation’s politics. According to the U.S. State Department, the Chinese government is set on using its influence to “reshape the global information environment” and has long manipulated information, intimidated critics, and used state-run media to try to bolster the Communist Party of China’s reputation abroad. Lawmakers have also cited privacy concerns, suggesting that TikTok could turn American user data over to the CPC—again without definitive proof that this has ever occurred.
This week, Senator Mark Warner told reporters that, although many young Americans are skeptical of the case against the app, “at the end of the day, they’ve not seen what Congress has seen.” But until the American public is let in on the supposed revelations included in these classified briefings, the case against TikTok will feel like it is based on little more than the vague idea that China shouldn’t own any information distribution tool that Americans use regularly. Some of the evidence may also be of dubious provenance—as Wired reported recently, a TikTok whistleblower who claims to have spoken with numerous politicians about a potential ban may have overstated his role at the company and offered numerous improbable claims about its inner workings.
TikTok, for its part, has argued that it has made good-faith efforts to comply with U.S. law. In 2022, it spent $1.5 billion on data-security initiatives, including partnering with Oracle to move American user data Stateside. Under the partnership, Oracle is in charge of auditing TikTok data for compliance. But, as Forbes reported last year, some user data from American TikTok creators and businesses, including Social Security numbers, appear to have been stored on Chinese servers. Such reports are legitimately alarming but with further context might also be moot; although the ability to do so has recently been limited, for a long time, China (or anyone else for that matter) could purchase such personal information from data brokers. (In fact, China has reportedly accessed such data in the past—from American-owned companies such as Twitter and Facebook.)
The nuances of the government’s concerns matter, because TikTok is probably going to challenge this law based on the notion that forcing a sale or banning the app is a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights. The government will likely argue that, under Chinese ownership, the app presents a clear and present national-security threat, and hope that the phrase acts as a cheat code to compel the courts without further evidence.
Nobody knows what is going to happen, and part of the reason is that the entire process has been rushed, passed under the cover of a separate and far more pressing bill that includes humanitarian aid to Gaza, weapons aid for Israel, and money to assist the Ukrainian war effort. This tactic is common among legislators, but in this case, the TikTok bill’s hurried passage masks any attempts to game out the logistics of a TikTok ban or divestiture.
Setting aside the possibility that the courts declare the law unconstitutional, here are just a few of the glaring logistical issues facing the legislation: First, recommendation algorithms—in TikTok’s case, the code that determines what individual users see on the app and the boogeyman at the center of this particular congressional moral panic—are part of China’s export-control list. The country must approve the sale of that technology, and, as one expert told NPR recently, the Chinese government has said unequivocally that it will not do so. TikTok’s potential buyer may, in essence, be purchasing a brand, a user base, and a user interface, without its most precious proprietary ingredient.
This might make for a tough sell, which raises the second issue: Who is going to buy TikTok? At the heart of the government’s case against the app lies a contradiction. The logic is that TikTok is the beating heart of a social-media industrial complex that mines our data and uses them to manipulate our behavior, and, as such, it is very bad for an authoritarian country to have access to these tools. Left unsaid, though, is why, if the government believes this is true, should anyone have access to these tools? If we’re to grant the lawmakers’ claim that TikTok is a powerful enough tool to influence the outcomes of American elections, surely the process of choosing a buyer would have to be rigorous and complicated. One analysis of TikTok’s U.S. market values the app at $100 billion—a sum that rather quickly narrows down the field of buyers.
Tech giants such as Meta and Microsoft come to mind, which, if approved, would amount to a massive consolidation in the social-media space, giving these companies greater control over how Americans distribute and consume information (a responsibility that Meta, at least, would rather not deal with, especially when it comes to political news; it has overtly deprioritized the sharing of news in Threads, its X competitor). Bids from Oracle and Walmart have been floated in the past, both of which would amount to selling a ton of user data to already powerful companies. That leaves private-equity funds and pooled purchases from interested American investors, such as Steve Mnuchin (who, as Treasury secretary during the Trump administration, was vocally in favor of a TikTok ban) and a handful of billionaires.
[Read: The moneyball theory of presidential social media]
But as we’ve seen from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, putting the fate of a social-media platform into the hands of a few highly motivated individuals can quickly turn into a nightmare. A Muskian ideological purchase would mean a set of owners manipulating the app as part of an extended political project, perhaps even one that works against the interests of the United States—almost exactly what lawmakers fear China might be doing. There is, too, the ironic possibility that any outside investors with enough money to purchase the app might themselves have ties to China, as Musk himself does through Tesla. In this scenario, a sale might end up merely providing the CPC with a helpful veneer of plausible deniability.
There is also the Trump factor. The law gives the sitting president broad authority to judge a worthy buyer, and it gives ByteDance 270 days to find a suitor—a period that the president can extend by 90 days. Close observers might note that there are 194 days until the next election and some 270 days until the next president is sworn into office. It stands to reason that Biden’s qualified buyer might be different from one selected by Donald Trump, who has his own media conglomerate and social app, Truth Social, and is famous for self-dealing.
Trump, for his part, has reversed his opinion on TikTok’s sale (he had previously been in favor but now opposes it), reportedly after pressure from one of his China-friendly mega donors. If elected, Trump could plausibly attempt a reversal of policy or simply turn around and approve the sale of TikTok to a group with close ties to China. Or, of course, the courts could strike all of this down. Regardless of who is president at the time, this is a lot of authority to grant to one partisan authority. You can play this 37-dimensional game of mergers-and-acquisitions chess all day long, but, ultimately, nobody knows what’s going on. It’s chaos!
Process matters. If you’re of the mind that TikTok is a pressing national-security threat, you’d be well within your rights to be frustrated by the way this bill has been shoehorned into law. It happened so quickly that the government might not be able to adequately prove its national-security case and might miss this opportunity. And if you, like me, believe that TikTok is bad in the ways all algorithmic social media is bad, but not uniquely bad—that is, if you believe that the harms presented by social media are complex and cannot be reduced to an Axis of Evil designation—you might very well be furious that the first major legislation against a Big Tech company is, at this point, little more than vibes-based fearmongering. The case for TikTok is debatable, but the path the government has taken to determine its fate is unquestionably sloppy and shortsighted.