The future TikTok ban – something that terrifies 170 million Americans and an untold number of online entrepreneurs – is quickly becoming a tangible reality. But until it crystallizes with a signature from US President Joe Biden, nothing is certain and everyone has questions.
Since the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would impose a ban unless TikTok’s parent company, China’s ByteDance, sells the platform, not a day goes by without someone asking me if TikTok should be removed from the App Stores and American phones will disappear. .
Some believe a ban is all but inevitable. I’m not so sure. Even those who support the bill — which now heads to the U.S. Senate — insist a ban was never the goal.
If Senator Mark Warner told NPR this week“People said it was a TikTok ban. No, we want China to divest.” In other words, the US government hopes to force ByteDance to sell, leaving the option of a ban as a last resort.
Warner points to an earlier success, when the The US government has pressured Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun to divest from Grindr dating app, with the company selling its stake in 2020. However, a few key differences between the cases make it much less likely that the US will have similar success with TikTok.
Grindr was founded and developed in the US in 2009 and later acquired by a Chinese company. TikTok, which started life in 2012 as the lip-sync app Music.ly, was developed in China by ByteDance. The company eventually merged TikTok and Music.ly, with TikTok in the US and a separate, though essentially identical, app called Douyin in China.
TikTok’s enormous popularity in the US is certainly a point of pride for Chinese officials, and there is virtually no reason to divest it. US lawmakers demanding that China sell TikTok to an American company is equivalent to someone demanding that the Ford Motor Company sell its Mustang business to a company outside the US.
There is an essential unfairness in this American demand – or at least there would be if it were not for the X-factor of legitimate national security concerns.
What if they are right?
One argument Warner has made to virtually anyone who will listen is that ByteDance, as a China-based company, should do whatever the Chinese government – essentially the Chinese Communist Party – asks. There is a legitimate concern that in the November presidential election, the party could require ByteDance to adjust its powerful and effective TikTok algorithm to favor one candidate over another (whichever is most beneficial to the Chinese Communist Party).
What Senator Warner and other officials rarely discuss is the work TikTok has done over the past two years to firewall U.S. TikTok operations from China. ProjectTexas, as it was called, moved all data to US cloud support, added independent US oversight, and even migrated older data from Chinese servers. Seven thousand American employees oversee TikTok’s American operations. So hasn’t TikTok done enough to please US lawmakers? Apparently not – and for me there is one big, nagging question.
Who controls the algorithm? While TikTok’s APIs and data are more or less transparently controlled and managed in the US, it’s not at all clear who programs, updates, and controls TikTok’s powerful algorithm. You could describe that part of the operation as a black box, and I think that concerns everyone from Senator Warner to President Biden.
A forked road
But the way I see it, we now have two unshakable forces. The US government, which is emboldened by near-total bipartisan support and will not back down on its demands for divestiture, and the Chinese, who have no interest in relinquishing control of one of their more successful digital US companies to give.
If there’s a glimmer of hope, it’s that the hard deadline you’ve heard about — quick passage through the U.S. Senate, Biden’s signature, and then six months until a sale or ban — isn’t as immovable as it sounds. Warner even admitted to NPR that an extension is possible.
Even under the most favorable circumstances, completing a complex business takeover or sale is an extremely complex matter. Even if all regulatory approvals are missed, a sale could still take 12 months or more.
For those who use and love Twitter, this is all cold comfort. I’ve noticed that frequent TikTokers are now posting with one foot towards the door, noting that if this all goes wrong, “you can find me on Instagram.”
Let’s say TikTok is banned. It’ll suck for a while. But eventually we’ll migrate to Reels, Shorts or something else, which will be fine since China doesn’t own them.