Is TikTok Really Worth Saving?

Starting on Sunday, January 19, any American who wants to turn off their brain and scroll through TikTok, the social media app that has feasted on the country’s attention span for years, will either be blocked from doing so, will find the service works sporadically, or if it does continue to work, new users will be unable to download TikTok from app stores, as it will no longer available in the United States. After years of debate over the fate of the Chinese-made social media app, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a ban on Friday requiring TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to sell the company by the end of the coming weekend, or the platform will be outlawed in the United States indefinitely. President Joe Biden has said he will not intervene with the decision and instead will leave the fate of the app to Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated as President on Monday.

It’s no surprise that half of America’s youth are opposed to TikTok’s prohibition—even if it’s built by a rival country. They object to fears that this platform will shape their minds or collect mountains of personal data on them. To do something like this is paranoid, draconian, and simply unfair, according to over a million videos on TikTok. In reality, what these TikTok faithfuls are railing against is exactly what the Chinese government has done for years with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snap, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and even Google, ensuring that none of those US platforms can slip past its Great Firewall.

And yet, China’s own social media juggernaut—which is estimated to have over 2 billion users (170 million of whom are in the US) who spend an average of 58 minutes a day on the platform—has become one of the No. 1 platforms for media consumption for America’s youth. The app, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has become the de facto platform for Gen Z, shaping everything from fashion trends to the kinds of books they buy and the music they listen to. Over the past year, the US government has concluded that this app isn’t just boosting Colleen Hoover’s books onto The New York Times bestseller list or encouraging people to exercise by trying the “plank challenge,” rather, they’ve argued it poses a national security risk.

To guard against that risk, Congress signed a bipartisan bill back in April that would ban the app domestically unless ByteDance sold it to an American entity. ByteDance, for its part, has said it would simply shut the app down rather than sell it to an American company. Both President Biden and Trump, his soon-to-be successor, are said to be exploring legal avenues for keeping the app accessible in the US. Meanwhile, there’s a growing list of potential financiers who, it’s rumored, might come to the rescue, including MrBeast, Sam Altman, and Kevin O’Leary. On Monday, Bloomberg likewise reported that Elon Musk might buy TikTok at the eleventh hour. (ByteDance has denied this scenario, calling it pure “fiction.”)

In any event, millions of TikTik’s Gen Z boosters find it laughable that their favorite platform—where  culture is churned out in rectangular videos via seemingly innocuous dance challenges and snack-sized comedy bits—could pose any danger beyond just contributing to the fast pace at which today’s society moves. (Of course, that opinion was encouraged when TikTok pushed urgent-sounding notifications, prompting users to “Take action: Speak up against a TikTok shutdown,” and other alerts that warned users their freedom to create was at risk.)

Some US officials and cybersecurity experts insist this platform may actually be a Trojan horse, funneling sensitive data—from precise locations to private chats—straight into ByteDance’s servers, which the Chinese government, they say, can look at whatever it wants. Lisa Plaggemier of The National Cybersecurity Alliance has warned repeatedly that what might seem like harmless scrolling has the potential to lead to disinformation campaigns and powering a sophisticated surveillance system, data breaches, and a foreign interest that could manipulate online discourse. But not everyone in the national security community feels as strongly as Plaggemier; others contend that the US government still lacks direct, smoking-gun evidence that China is using ByteDance’s data to stoke domestic division, rendering the risks largely hypothetical. In its own defense, TikTok has cited Project Texas, a $1.5 billion plan that the company says routes Americans’ user data through the Austin-based tech firm Oracle, effectively making that data out of China’s reach.  

Nevertheless, two members of Congress told me that the information they have been given about TikTok from other branches of government over the past year has been highly concerning. One congressman claimed that their briefings revealed alarming data showing TikTok’s algorithms deliberately fostering anti-American sentiments among users. (ByteDance has said it does not promote certain content over others. Rather, the more users engage with a type of content, the more they see of that same type.) He expressed deep concern about the delayed public awareness of TikTok’s psychological impact on young people. The other official, a congresswoman, described her shock upon learning about the prevalence of pro-Palestinian hashtags on TikTok as opposed to pro-Israel ones, which were dwarfed by a factor of ten to one.

In a similar vein, in 2023, The Wall Street Journal conducted an experiment where its reporters signed up for TikTok pretending to be 13-year-olds, and within a matter of hours, the app was bombarding them with doomsday, conspiracy-tinged, and extremely polarizing content amid the Israel-Hamas war; that content was largely pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel. Even when the reporters switched one of these “teen” accounts over to restricted mode, it was still drowned in vivid, and often graphic, videos and commentary about global conflicts.

RAND, the policy and decision-making research center, has argued that the primary security risk lies not in the collection of personal data, but in the vast amount of publicly posted videos. Its researchers argued that the 34 million videos posted daily on TikTok could serve as ideal training material for massive generative AI models, potentially enabling the creation of convincing deepfakes and large-scale videos targeting Americans. One security researcher I spoke with last year warned that if China has been collecting all of these videos over the past several years, they could create a kind of 3D map of America that includes malls, homes, schools, and every other building across the country. With this data, they could easily produce millions of fake videos and seed them onto the platform, sowing confusion and chaos in a cyber attack. What’s worse, he warned, is that if there was ever a conflict between China and the US, the Chinese would have a blueprint of every structure in America, inside and out. “To me, that’s a giant red flag in itself,” he told me.