Who banned TikTok? Politicians toss culpability like a football | TikTok

The United States of America deleted TikTok early on the morning of 19 January. A government formed “by the people, for the people”, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, has made scant evidence available to those people as to why. As those in power at the 11th hour realize how unpopular such a paternalistic move might be, each is doing their best to lay blame with the others.

Why did the US ban an app used and beloved by some 170 million Americans? For fear of China’s propaganda and data collection. It’s a far-reaching, unprecedented move. The text of the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed in April and signed by Joe Biden, reads: “This bill prohibits distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (eg, TikTok).” Both a federal appeals court and the US supreme court have affirmed that rationale as sufficient.

In their unanimous ruling, US supreme court justices wrote: “There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community. But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”

And yet the government has to date published no evidence that the Chinese Communist party has manipulated Americans’ TikTok feeds. The mere spectre of such “covert manipulation”, as the US solicitor general called it during supreme court oral arguments, was enough. The US attempted to submit classified evidence to the court, which may have contained the smoking digital gun, but the court declined to consider it since the information would be withheld from TikTok’s counsel. To the second reason – TikTok does collect sensitive information on its users.

The justices wrote in their unanimous opinion: “Even if China has not yet leveraged its relationship with ByteDance Ltd to access US TikTok users’ data, petitioners offer no basis for concluding that the Government’s determination that China might do so is not at least a ‘reasonable inferenc[e] based on substantial evidence.’”

And so here we are. The deadline for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to announce a sale to a non-Chinese owner has passed without intervention from the US supreme court, Biden or the US Congress. Donald Trump wants to save the app, and he’s loudly thinking about issuing an executive order to do it, but that will have to wait for another day. For now, TikTok is gone.

Each party involved is trying hard to disclaim responsibility.

From the start, ByteDance adopted an all-or-nothing approach, refusing to entertain the possibility of selling the app. Two years ago, Beijing indicated it would likewise oppose a sale, and the Chinese government has offered few comments since. There were no reports of deals almost reached or a secret meeting between a potential buyer and a company executive. Should a sale be put in motion, Beijing would need to approve the export of TikTok’s algorithm to a foreign power. It was ban or bust. It didn’t have to be.

The White House, for its part, on Friday clung to its position that TikTok “should remain available to Americans, but simply under American ownership”. What has the White House done to make that happen? It was Biden himself who signed the ban-or-sale bill into law. Biden now says he will not enforce the ban, throwing the political football to Trump, who will be inaugurated on Monday and says he’ll give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from the ban.

But it was Trump himself who originated the TikTok ban in 2020. He now says he wants to “save TikTok” and may order the US justice department to go light on the enforcement of it. Circumventing an act of Congress affirmed by the nation’s highest court would be an extraordinary feat of legal contravention, and yet it is one of the likely outcomes of our current predicament. Who was it, then, who banned TikTok? Whose fault is it?

Scrolling through the app on Friday, references to the ban run the gamut from playful jabs at the government’s disconnection:

“It’s not global warming. It’s not access to healthcare, welfare – boring! Corruption at the top, citizens getting shot, with all that’s going on, right now’s the perfect time for banning TikTok!” the lyrics of a song by @oct_official about the current situation read. It has received about 600,000 likes.

To rage:

“The saddest part of this entire fucking thing is that the United States government just looked its people square in the fucking face, right in the eyeballs, and said, ‘Your voice doesn’t matter, and it never fucking did!’ They sell you the American dream; they sell you the freedoms that you think you fucking have; and then they turn around, they strip them from you, and they say there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it. Fascist countries ban apps,” @bryanandrewsmusic, with 2.6m followers, yelled from his car. His video has accrued 1.3m likes.

To heartfelt eulogies:

“It genuinely feels like our parents just came in the middle of the school year and said, ‘Yeah, forget all your friends, forget all the hard work you did at this school, you’re going to have to start from scratch,” TikToker @inzlay said in a video of herself crying and bidding farewell to her TikTok following of 24,500. She racked up 300,000 likes. “It sounds dramatic to say I don’t know what I’ll do without TikTok, but I really don’t know who I’m going to be without TikTok. A large part of who I have become in the last six years and a large part of my growth has come from a lot of the stuff I’ve learned off this app. I really hate to say goodbye.”

In court, however, justices have sided with the argument that the government can judge new technologies and major expressive outlets to be threats and snuff them out. Thus the legal argument stands, and the ban is upheld.