{"id":8371,"date":"2023-01-17T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-17T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atswins.ai\/blog\/the-us-governments-tiktok-bans-explained\/"},"modified":"2023-01-17T11:30:00","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T11:30:00","slug":"the-us-governments-tiktok-bans-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atswins.ai\/blog\/the-us-governments-tiktok-bans-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"The US government\u2019s TikTok bans, explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The act of scrolling through your For You feed on TikTok might come with an additional sense of impending doom these days. After years of hand-wringing over the enormously popular app\u2019s ties to China and the potential national security threat they present, it looks like someone is going to do something about it.<\/p>\n

TikTok is grappling with an increasingly real prospect of being banned in the United States. This wouldn\u2019t just be a mostly performative prohibition of installing the app on federal or state government-owned devices. It could also be more impactful than the legally questionable ban that former President Donald Trump tried and failed to enact in 2020. The ban TikTok is now facing would forbid its China-based parent company, ByteDance, from doing business in the United States, which would block Apple and Google from hosting the TikTok app in their app stores. It wouldn\u2019t make it illegal for you, the consumer, to use TikTok. It would just make it much harder to do so.<\/p>\n

Banning an app is more the provenance of countries like, well, China, which has banned a number of American apps and websites, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. It\u2019s also not certain that the US government actually would take such a huge step. But you\u2019ve surely heard that it could happen, and you\u2019re probably wondering if and how it would \u2014 or even why it\u2019s necessary.<\/p>\n

Seemingly every Big Tech company is facing unprecedented levels of scrutiny these days, but TikTok faces opposition that its peers don\u2019t. At a time when US-Chinese relations aren\u2019t great, TikTok\u2019s popularity is a threat to America\u2019s technological superiority, especially when it comes to the internet. But US lawmakers are much more likely to point to the perceived threat to national security, believing that the Chinese government is using the app to spy on Americans and push harmful content onto them through the app\u2019s powerful yet mysterious For You recommendation algorithm. <\/p>\n

To deal with these conflicts, ByteDance has spent over three years negotiating with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, an inter-agency group that reviews transactions involving foreign parties for national security threats. ByteDance hopes to reach an agreement that would allow TikTok to continue to do business here while minimizing the chances of interference from the Chinese government. While ByteDance says there is a draft agreement with CFIUS, it still hasn\u2019t been finalized. It didn\u2019t help matters when, in the last days of 2022, ByteDance had to admit that some of its employees improperly accessed US citizens\u2019 TikTok data as part of an investigation into leaks to journalists.<\/p>\n

ByteDance is spending a lot of money trying to convince detractors that it doesn\u2019t take marching orders from China and that it wouldn\u2019t give the Chinese government US user data or influence US users. The company has spent millions building up and expanding its Washington, DC, presence, and more than $1 billion on \u201cProject Texas,\u201d an effort to rebuild the app on US servers in order to wall it off from ByteDance and China as much as possible, while also promising several layers of independent oversight and transparency.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are confident that the proposal under consideration by CFIUS will fully satisfy US national security concerns,\u201d TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter told Recode.<\/p>\n

It looks like 2023 will finally be the year when we find out if ByteDance can convince an increasingly hostile audience that TikTok isn\u2019t a national security threat \u2014 or what happens to TikTok if it can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

TikTok\u2019s spending big on lobbyists and Project Texas<\/h3>\n

The only thing that may have grown faster than TikTok\u2019s popularity in the US is the company\u2019s DC presence. ByteDance spent just $270,000 on federal lobbyists in 2019, a year when TikTok agreed to a settlement with the FTC over children\u2019s privacy law violations for a then-record fine of $5.7 million and when lawmakers started to raise concerns over its ties to China. In August of that year, Trump issued his executive order proclaiming TikTok to be a national security threat and, using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, ordering it to be sold to an American company or banned within 45 days. This obviously didn\u2019t happen: President Joe Biden eventually rescinded the order, which was controversial to say the least, leaving it to CFIUS to make a deal with ByteDance. <\/p>\n

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