Allana Vanin

TikTok is currently one of the most popular social media apps in the world, with approximately 1.5 billion active users on the platform, 148 million of those users being American as of February 2024 according to Sprout Social. The social media app has specifically attracted the interest of many young people, with 44.4% of American TikTok users being under the age of 24 according to Backlinko. This has sparked a major concern among parents and legislators about age restrictions and data security on the app since it is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet technology company.

In July of 2020, former president Donald Trump proposed to ban TikTok declaring it as a threat to national security, which raised the concerns of many Americans wondering how this would impact their freedom of speech. This ban proposed by Trump never went forward, however, nearly 4 years later, a new bill proposing to ban TikTok has emerged and, according to AP News, president Joe Biden has confirmed he will sign the bill if it lands on his desk.

With the bill to ban TikTok having passed in the House of Representatives and currently awaiting decision in the Senate, what could an approval mean for the future of democracy in the United States and Americans’ first amendment right to freedom of speech?

In March of 2024, the House of Representative “passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app TikTok if its China-based owner doesn’t sell its stake, as lawmakers acted on concerns that the company’s current ownership structure is a national security threat.” writes Haleluya Hadero for AP News.

Many representatives who voted in favor of the ban have justified it by claiming that the app being owned by the Chinese company ByteDance is a threat to the security of many Americans since they “could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. whenever it wants,” which could negatively impact American democracy.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash states ““We have given TikTok a clear choice, Separate from your parent company ByteDance, which is beholden to the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), and remain operational in the United States, or side with the CCP and face the consequences.”

This has sparked many responses from experts, such as Anupam Chander, a professor of law at Georgetown University, who states for NPR “There’s no evidence of this. None of the claims here, even the insider claims that some employees make about access by people in China, that access isn’t by the Chinese government, but rather others within the Byte Dance corporate structure, to [look at] data about TikTok employees and others in the United States.”

Another professor of law and information science for the University of Washington, Ryan Calo states that this bill is more about the United States’ political tensions with China than about TikTok and the security of American users.

“The truth of the matter is, if the sophisticated Chinese intelligence sector wanted to gather information on particular state employees in the United States, it wouldn’t probably have to go through TikTok.”

Despite the many disputable reasons behind the ban, the bill shows no signs of slowing down and only time will time what the future of the TikTok in the United States will come to.