President Trump Should Enforce the TikTok Ban

On Thursday evening, social media app TikTok returned to Apple and Google’s app stores. This development comes after several political twists and turns. On January 20th, following his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order delaying the implementation of a newly effective law meant to “address legitimate national security and privacy concerns related to the Chinese Communist Party’s engagement with a frequently used social media platform” by 75 days. If TikTok is sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance to an American company before the deadline, it will be able to continue operating in the United States. If not, it will be banned. 

The prospect of a ban on TikTok has been controversial among the public, especially college-aged citizens. The app has over 170 million active US users. President Trump has been voicing his support for keeping the app legal. However, it is clearly in US public interest to ban TikTok. The app is a threat to national security, and banning it would be neither unconstitutional nor unethical. 

The statute signed into law by President Biden last spring required the app to be sold by its parent company ByteDance within a limited time period or be banned in the United States. The law was passed by Congress in response to national security concerns regarding TikTok’s connection to the Chinese Communist Party. These concerns are legitimate. In 2017, China passed a law requiring Chinese companies to assist in intelligence gathering if so requested by the government. Like most Chinese companies, ByteDance is legally obligated to have an in-house Communist Party committee within the company. The Chinese government also has a stake and board seat at ByteDance’s Chinese subsidiary filled by Wu Shugang, an official from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the nation’s internet censor. ByteDance has close ties to China’s defense and surveillance industries. Despite being separate companies, former TikTok employees have said that ByteDance is heavily involved in the app’s operation, and that boundaries between the two companies essentially don’t exist. These employees also revealed that ByteDance has access to US user data collected by Tiktok—data that it regularly requests. 

Tiktok has previously used the app to spy on the locations of American journalists in an effort to track leaks. When these allegations of covert surveillance were first reported, they were categorically denied by ByteDance and TikTok, who claimed that they “could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested,” and that they’d never attempted to “target…members of the US government, activists, public figures or journalists.” Once the allegations were confirmed by internal email revelations, however, these statements were acknowledged to be false. 

These ties are especially worrying because of the increasingly adversarial relationship between the United States and China. The People’s Republic of China is currently classified by the federal government as a foreign adversary (along with the Republic of Cuba, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Russian Federation). In recent decades, China has experienced huge economic growth and undertaken heavy military buildup, and President Xi Jinping has been vocally challenging the United States’ leading role in the world and calling for a restructuring of the liberal international order. Alongside its economic growth, China’s government and society have become increasingly authoritarian under President Xi, who has dismantled the nation’s limited liberal reforms and criticizes the West’s ideological commitment to the value of human rights. China has been accused of acting like a “bully” by neighboring countries due to its aggressive naval activity and attempts at territorial expansion in the region. It has also materially supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the past several years. China conducts widespread industrial espionage against the United States, stealing American intellectual property, technology, and trade secrets. There are also many cases of military and political espionage toward the US by China. Espionage against the US occurs more widely from China than from any other country by a wide margin. Much of this theft and espionage occurs in cyberspace, making the CCP’s ties to TikTok that much more worrying. China denies having its own ambitions of global hegemony. Some scholars disagree, but regardless, the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive behavior and increasingly hostile stance towards the US make its connections to TikTok a clear national security threat. 

Despite the initial TikTok bill passing in Congress with wide margins, not everyone supports it. Some critics, including the ACLU, have argued that it violates the First Amendment to the Constitution and the principle of free speech. However, this objection doesn’t make much sense when inspected. No citizen’s right to speech is being abridged, and no information is being censored. As an avid scroller myself, I’d argue that there’s no qualitative difference between the content posted on TikTok and the content posted on, for example, Instagram Reels. If TikTok is banned, content creators using the app to communicate with an audience can just use one of the countless other social media platforms without ties to adversarial foreign states. 

Others have argued that it is misguided to worry so much about TikTok’s data collection when many American companies engage in similar practices via social media platforms. This, however, misses the reason that TikTok’s prominence is so concerning. Many are rightfully concerned about invasive data collecting practiced by companies such as Meta, which uses sensitive data about its users to target them with invasive, personalized advertisements. If this were the primary issue with TikTok, I, and likely many legislators in Washington, would be much less enthusiastic about forcing divestment or outright banning the app. The issues lawmakers and much of the public have with TikTok stem from the app’s ties to a government in open competition with the United States, whose political interests are adverse to ours. 

The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” has been passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by a president. Its legality has been unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court. It currently isn’t being enforced due to an executive order issued by President Trump, which delays the deadline by which the app must be sold. Trump is confident he can broker a deal to bring TikTok into American ownership, whether by presiding over a bidding war between various tech companies for the app, or, unorthodoxly, having the US government buy it directly via a proposed sovereign wealth fund. Trump has also suggested extending the deadline even further, in order to allow more time for a deal to be passed. 

Many signs point to Trump being on a fool’s errand. For years, ByteDance has said that selling the app to a foreign buyer would be impossible, because the Chinese government wouldn’t allow it. In 2023, China announced that it would “firmly” oppose a forced sale of TikTok. It considers TikTok’s recommendation algorithms to be advanced technology important to the country’s national interest. A sale of the app would require a license and approval from China’s government. Last spring, when the bill was introduced to Congress, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said it was “sheer robbers’ logic to try every means to snatch from others all the good things that they have.” Brock Silvers, chief investment officer of Kaiyuan Capital, a private equity investment firm based in China, said that it “seems extremely unlikely that Beijing will accept any deal that removes TikTok’s algorithm from its direct control and regulatory authority.” 

It is quite unlikely that TikTok will be bought by an American company, and Trump’s confidence that he can secure a deal seems unfounded. Every extension of the deadline perpetuates the national security threat the app imposes—a threat that he was once very aware of. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but right now, I believe that Trump’s best course of action would be to not extend his executive order delaying the ban, instead simply allowing the law to be enforced.