In his first term, President Donald Trump tried to force TikTok’s parent company to sell its popular app or cease operating in the U.S., citing the need to “take aggressive action … to protect our national security.”
But in his return to the Oval Office, Trump delayed enforcement of a law that would have forced TikTok to shut down in the U.S. on Jan. 19. And, in a Jan. 22 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump downplayed concerns he once raised about TikTok as a national security risk, saying he is “starting to have a very warm spot” for TikTok because he did well with young voters.
“You know, the interesting thing with TikTok though is you’re dealing with a lot of young people,” Trump told Hannity. “So, is it that important for China to be spying … on young kids watching crazy videos?”
The answer for some members of Congress and cybersecurity experts is a resounding yes.
“Let’s be clear, TikTok is absolutely a national security threat,” Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Jan. 26. Turner, a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, cited the vast amount of data that TikTok collects on U.S. users and Chinese laws that require TikTok to turn over that data to the Chinese Communist Party upon request.
In the first of two executive orders he issued in August 2020 to address the alleged threat posed by TikTok, Trump explained how TikTok data could be used against the U.S. government, residents and companies.
“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories,” an Aug. 6, 2020, executive order said. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
Others, however, say the U.S. has failed to provide evidence that TikTok poses an actual threat, as opposed to a theoretical threat. They also question how the forced sale of TikTok would protect U.S. user data if China can still purchase it from private data brokers that collect and sell such information.
“China is unquestionably a foreign adversary, and the threats posed by TikTok’s popularity and China’s theoretical ability to demand huge amounts of data about American citizens are real,” Kat Duffy, senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a Jan. 17 blog post shortly before Trump delayed enforcement of the TikTok law for 75 days.
But, she wrote, “[i]f Congress is going to force the sale of a platform used by more than 170 million Americans to share and receive information—which generates billions of dollars in revenue for U.S. small businesses and creators—Americans deserve more than, ‘Trust us!’ and generalized national security warnings.”
Here, we will summarize the facts about TikTok and the national security concerns that some have about a Chinese company operating the app in the U.S.
The Rise of TikTok and Concerns About National Security
ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing, China, first released the TikTok app in September 2016. But it wasn’t available in the United States until August 2018 – nine months after ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based video-sharing app that operated in the U.S. and had an office in California, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
ByteDance merged Musical.ly and TikTok to form one very popular app known for its addictive short-form videos. It wasn’t long after the August 2018 merger that concerns about TikTok surfaced.
“I and others were raising alarms in 2019 when we noticed that the popularity of TikTok was growing,” Lindsay Gorman, managing director and senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund’s Technology Program, told us in an interview.
What concerned Gorman at that time was the curious absence of TikTok videos about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The protests, which started in the spring of 2019, were in response to a bill that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be extradited to China.
In September 2019, the Washington Post reported that the pro-democracy hashtag #hongkong was prevalent on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, but not on TikTok. That raised concerns, the Post wrote, that TikTok was censoring “sympathetic memes and imagery from the hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy marchers.”
Days after the Post article, the Guardian reported that TikTok’s content moderation policy “instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” citing internal company guidelines.
The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2019: The guidelines divide banned material into two categories: some content is marked as a “violation”, which sees it deleted from the site entirely, and can lead to a user being banned from the service. But lesser infringements are marked as “visible to self”, which leaves the content up but limits its distribution through TikTok’s algorithmically-curated feed.
Two weeks later, then-Sen. Marco Rubio – who is now secretary of state in the Trump administration – asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, to review “the national security implications” of ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly.
“According to reports, TikTok acquired Musical.ly, a video-sharing platform, without any oversight and relaunched the service for Western markets,” Rubio wrote. “These Chinese-owned apps are increasingly being used to censor content and silence open discussion on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Government and Communist Party. These topics include Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other issues.”
TikTok denied allegations of censorship. “Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China,” the company said in a blog post, adding that it is “not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government.”
CFIUS did the review that Rubio had requested. On Aug. 14, 2020, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the committee unanimously recommended to Trump that he force ByteDance to divest from TikTok. On that same day, Trump issued an order requiring ByteDance to divest from TikTok and destroy data it had collected on TikTok users in the United States. It was the second time that month that Trump had issued an executive order calling for action against TikTok’s owners.
However, as we have written, TikTok and TikTok users successfully challenged Trump’s order, stopping it from taking effect. “The courts ultimately sided with the plaintiffs and issued preliminary injunctions temporarily barring the United States from enforcing the restrictions,” CRS said in a September 2023 report.
After he assumed the presidency in 2021, Joe Biden withdrew Trump’s executive orders on TikTok, and the lawsuits were dismissed, CRS said in its report. But TikTok would continue to grow in popularity, and the effort to force the sale of TikTok would continue.
In March, the House overwhelmingly passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by a vote of 352 to 65. A month later, it became law as part of an emergency supplemental bill that Biden signed April 24.
The new law gave ByteDance 270 days, or nine months, to sell TikTok, and an extension of no more than three months if it can show “significant progress” toward complying with the law.
Instead of initiating a sale, TikTok went to court to argue that the law violated the constitutional right to free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law in a Jan. 17 decision.
If TikTok continued to operate beyond Jan. 19, U.S. companies that provide services to TikTok, such as those that host TikTok’s data and distribute its app, could be fined $5,000 for each TikTok user in the U.S. Although it briefly shut down its app on Jan. 19, TikTok was back online after gaining assurances from Trump that he would not enforce the law.
On Jan. 20, his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order that instructed the U.S. attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days “to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.”
On Feb. 3, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments to create a sovereign wealth fund. At the signing, Trump said the government-owned investment fund might be used to purchase TikTok.
“We’re going to be doing something perhaps with TikTok, perhaps not,” Trump said. “If we make the right deal, we’ll do it. Otherwise, we won’t. … Or if we do a partnership with very wealthy people, a lot of options. But we could put that, as an example, in the fund.”
TikTok Data Collection
Asked if TikTok poses a national security threat, Gorman, the German Marshall Fund senior fellow, told us that the app poses “two key threats.”
The first, she said, is about data – a massive collection of information that has grown in size since Trump last held office. In 2020, TikTok had about 49 million U.S. users. Since then, TikTok says it has more than tripled its number of U.S. users to more than 150 million.
“TikTok collects a range of user information, including location data and internet address, keystroke patterns, and the type of device being used to access the app,” CRS said in a June 2023 report. “The app also collects and stores a user’s browsing and search history within the app, as well as the content of any messages exchanged using the app.
“Additional information can be collected based on user permission: phone number, phone book, and social-network contacts; GPS data; user age; user-generated content (e.g., photos and videos); store payment information; and the videos ‘liked,’ shared, watched all the way through, and re-watched,” the CRS report said.
CRS said TikTok’s data collection “appears to be comparable to what other social media companies gather and use,” but it noted that the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China “requires Chinese companies to cooperate with government intelligence operations if so requested.”
Gorman said the fact that TikTok must give China its user data upon request is a national security concern.
“In the U.S.,” she said, “there has to be a court order,” backed by evidence and signed by a judge, before a company is forced to turn over such data to the government.
In its June 2023 report, CRS said, “TikTok forcefully states that it does not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government.” But the report added that “TikTok did admit that employees in China had accessed the data of a few U.S. journalists in 2022.”
In that case, four ByteDance employees who were investigating internal leaks to the media improperly accessed TikTok data on reporters for BuzzFeed and Financial Times. After an internal investigation, ByteDance fired four employees, including two based in China, and imposed tougher restrictions on access to user data, CNN reported.
BuzzFeed said ByteDance’s targeting of its reporter “comes in the wake of a series of reports by BuzzFeed News that exposed major issues within its parent company, from employees accessing American users’ data from China to ByteDance’s attempts to push pro-China messaging to Americans.” The Financial Times said its reporter had written stories about a staff exodus at TikTok’s London office over working conditions.
Is TikTok a Propaganda Threat?
The second threat to U.S. national security, Gorman said, is the potential for the Chinese Communist Party to use TikTok data for covert or overt propaganda campaigns aimed at U.S. citizens.
Although Trump dismissed TikTok users as “kids watching crazy videos,” Gorman cited a rise in the percentage of U.S. residents who get their news from TikTok and an increase in politicians using the popular app to reach voters.
In two surveys taken in the last two years, Pew found that most younger adults in the U.S. use TikTok and a growing percentage of younger adults say they get their news from the app.
“TikTok use is especially prevalent among younger adults – 56% of all U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 say they use the platform,” according to a Pew Research Center survey taken in August 2023.
In a separate survey last year, Pew Research Center found that 17% of U.S. adults regularly get their news from TikTok, including 39% of young adults under 30 years old who cited TikTok as their news source. By comparison, Pew found that only 3% of all U.S. adults and 9% of adults under 30 years got their news from TikTok in 2020.
“More and more people are getting their news on TikTok – 30% of Americans under a certain age get news from TikTok,” Gorman told us. “At the height of the Cold War, I don’t think we would have allowed the Soviet Union to own a social media site that delivers news to 30% of Americans.”
Gorman also said a report she co-authored last year found that 27% of all candidates in 2024 for Congress and two statewide races (gubernatorial and secretary of state) had TikTok accounts — an increase from 23% in the 2022 campaigns. “It’s no longer just this fun, viral thing,” she said of TikTok.
Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told an audience at the University of Michigan’s Ford School in December 2022 that the Chinese government has the potential to control TikTok’s algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content and, if they want to, to use it for influence operations [that] are a lot more worrisome in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party than whether or not you’re steering somebody as an influencer to one product or another.”
Gorman recalled how Russia’s Internet Research Agency carried out a covert propaganda campaign on Facebook to support Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Now, just imagine if Russia owned Facebook,” she said.
A more recent example may have occurred in Romania, but this time on TikTok.
“Romania just set aside its entire presidential election because of concerns that TikTok has manipulated data and propaganda with respect to its presidential election,” Turner said on “Face the Nation.”
The Ohio congressman was referring to Calin Georgescu’s surprising victory on Nov. 24 in the first round of Romania’s presidential election, which has been tossed out by Romania’s Constitutional Court. Romanian officials claim that the far-right, pro-Russia candidate benefited “from a Russia-style booster campaign involving TikTok, according to declassified Romanian intelligence documents,” Politico reported. A new election will take place in May, Politico said.
Both TikTok and Russia have denied interfering in the election to help Georgescu.
Mark Scott, a senior resident fellow at the Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council, agreed with Gorman that “[d]ata that falls into the hands of an adversarial country may pose a direct national security threat, including via data brokers.”
“What we’ve seen, based on what information can be collected, including people’s geolocation, contacts, and data about their devices, is that such data can help adversarial countries garner an in-depth understanding of American citizens,” Scott told us in an email. “Such insight can then be fed into efforts, either via overt propaganda or covert influence campaigns, that target Americans.”
However, Scott wrote in a Jan. 9 post on the Atlantic Council website that forcing ByteDance to sell or shut down TikTok in the U.S. won’t “make Americans’ data more private and secure.”
“While US officials have raised concerns about how Americans’ data may be accessed by Chinese government officials via TikTok, such personal information—from people’s phone numbers and home addresses to internet activity to consumer purchasing history—is already available commercially, via so-called domestic data brokers,” he wrote. “The outgoing Biden administration tried to tackle that problem with the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act and prohibitions placed on these data brokers from transferring such sensitive data to foreign adversaries like China.”
The House unanimously passed the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act in March, but the bill did not come up for a vote in the Senate.
Gorman agreed that Congress should pass that legislation, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to solve what we can.” Forcing TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app is a good first step in protecting user data, she said.
“These are two separate problems. They are not at all the same,” Gorman said, referring to data brokers and a Chinese company owning TikTok. “The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t need a data broker if it has TikTok.”
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