On January 17, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress’ ban on the social-media platform TikTok is constitutional, forcing its parent company, ByteDance, either to sell TikTok or to block Americans from using it.
Congress had made it illegal “to distribute, maintain, or update … a foreign adversary controlled application.” TikTok is incorporated in California, where it has its main office; ByteDance was founded in China but is now incorporated in the Cayman Islands, with its leadership based in Singapore and America. Per TikTok’s court filings, ByteDance’s Chinese founder currently holds 21 percent of its stock. Since ByteDance has refused to sell, TikTok is now technically illegal in the United States, though President Donald Trump has ordered a 75-day reprieve on the ban against it to give ByteDance a last opportunity to sell to non-Chinese owners.
The U.S. government claims in its submissions to the courts that Beijing might use TikTok to harvest personal information of American users, and that TikTok might manipulate the content on its platform to suit the interests of the People’s Republic of China. TikTok rejects those claims. But China does require Communist Party secretaries for any large Chinese company, and TikTok has its party representative on the management team.
What’s more, the U.S. government says it has evidence pertaining to TikTok’s malfeasance, though it is not willing to share that evidence publicly. The Supreme Court said it based its ruling entirely on what’s on the public record, but as Justice Neil M. Gorsuch noted, “Efforts to inject secret evidence into judicial proceedings present obvious constitutional concerns.”
The whole situation is hard to parse. What do we know about China’s influence over TikTok?
Emile Dirks is an associate researcher with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Dirks says TikTok is mysterious, something whose inner workings remain obscure to outsiders. The best research on it is tentative, but hasn’t found direct evidence of TikTok censoring content in the way Chinese social-media platforms do. But the risk of it being manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party is real. Still, Dirks says, the deeper controversy over TikTok isn’t about censorship; it’s about the clash between the United States and China for primacy over the internet—at a time when the internet is, more and more, shaping the two powers’ societies and complicating their interests …
Gustav Jönsson: What is the U.S. government worried about here?
Oleg Ivanov
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