Are we about to lose TikTok? Like actually tho?

0:01NPR

0:11If the federal government has its way, the social video app TikTok could be banned in the U.S. as early as January 19th. And if that happened, it would disrupt what's become a favorite time killer for millions of Americans. Swiping on video after video after video after video after video. But TikTok is not about to just let this happen. It's suing to block this law, saying it violates its First Amendment rights. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, how did TikTok get to this point? And what can we expect from the company's last-ditch effort at survival? To learn more, we speak to NPR's own tech reporter, Bobby Allen, after the break.

1:06To discuss TikTok's complicated future with us, we're joined by Bobby Allen. He's a tech reporter here at NPR covering technology in Silicon Valley. I spend a couple hours of my life every day on TikTok. So I'm happy to talk about it for this podcast episode or for like 10 hours. I could just go on and on and on and on. So just to start us off, TikTok is this app that we've established a lot of people love. And on a surface level, at least, you could say like it seems relatively innocent. How do we get to the point where the government wants to ban it? Well, it all started in the halcyon days of the Trump administration.

1:46And the White House under Trump saw TikTok as a national security threat because its corporate pair company, ByteDance, is based in China. And because of the laws in China, it was theoretically possible then and remains so now that China could try to exert influence vis-a-vis ByteDance to change the opinions of Americans by fiddling with TikTok's algorithms, right? The second bucket of concerns has to do with data security. We're worried, well, 170 million Americans, that's more than half of the country. Do we really want that being vulnerable potentially for China to data mine? Trump tried to put it out of business and it was overturned in the courts.

2:27Then Biden gets into the White House. His national security folks continue to engage with TikTok, try to come up with some solution, and it all breaks down, right? And then all of a sudden, TikTok is blindsided earlier this year by a law that was passed that says, basically gives TikTok an ultimatum, divest completely from ByteDance or be shut down nationwide. And we've heard this threat before, but now it's really, really, really serious because it's codified into law. Congress passed this overwhelmingly. Biden signed it into law. And the big flashing date for TikTok is January 19th. They have until then to spin off from ByteDance or the process will begin of shutting the app down in the U.S.

3:09And just like remind us, if TikTok were banned, like what does that actually mean? So if you search for TikTok in the App Store, you won't find it. And that will mean over time, software updates will have no way of reaching the app. It will get slow. It will get buggy. And over the course of many months, it will just be rendered completely useless. Hmm. So the law that started this clock ticking, I think it's worth highlighting that it was passed with bipartisan support, right? Which is like not something you get to say all the time about Congress. So like, who are the factions that came together here to make this happen?

3:48Yeah, I mean, the factions that came together are basically every single type of lawmaker in Washington who just see China as a threat. They see China and they know they have a very robust and widespread espionage operation. There's a trade war. There's an IP intellectual property war. There's a war over who's going to lead the AI future. And all of those forces sort of came together and passed this bill. There was an aid package that was going to provide support to Ukraine and Israel. And tucked into that deal was a measure that gave TikTok this ultimatum. So that's the China aspect to this situation.

4:32But my understanding is also there were some lawmakers concerned about TikTok being a platform where a lot of people were talking about the war in Gaza. Yeah, no, absolutely. Shortly before lawmakers came together and tucked in this TikTok divestor band measure into the foreign aid bill, there were reports that came out that analyzed hashtags on TikTok and found that pro-Palestinian hashtags were seen more often than pro-Israel hashtags. and something that really brought them together around the common enemy that is TikTok. They saw TikTok as this potential propaganda tool that not only, at least in theory, can be used to push pro-China propaganda, but now the fear was it could be used to push views and to push videos that might be making a whole generation of young people anti-Israel.

5:30And this wasn't just a concern for conservative lawmakers? No. No, this was a bipartisan concern. But the really important thing to emphasize is the analysis was flawed. And if you know anything about TikTok, you know that hashtags are really not important. The most viral TikTok videos don't even use hashtags. It's such a one-dimensional way of analyzing virality on TikTok. TikTok isn't dead yet. They do have a chance under this law to sell to a non-Chinese company, and that would sort of avoid the ban. But ByteDance has been pretty clear that TikTok is not for sale. So now they're in court. What are both sides of this case saying?

6:13Yeah, so I went to Washington, D.C. and went to this federal appeals court hearing where the DOJ squared up with lawyers for TikTok. It was sort of a reiteration of what we heard from both sides for a while. The Justice Department got up and said... ...that there is so much happening in China outside the control of the United States that it poses a grave national security risk. And TikTok came up and said, we are being unfairly singled out. This is a suppression of the free speech rights of both TikTok US and TikTok's millions of users. I think it's an unusual law though, Your Honor. It's a pretty unusual law, an unprecedented law, as far as we know, that specifically targets one speaker.

6:51Did you have any sense of how these judges are weighing these arguments? It's really hard to say. The judges were poking holes on sort of both sides, right? With the DOJ's case defending the law, the judges had some questions about whether TikTok is being singled out. The judges also were wondering if this is the most narrowly tailored solution to deal with the national security threat. If the government is going to suppress speech in some way, they really have to do it in the most narrow way possible. When it came to TikTok, you know, the lawyers kept saying, okay, we have a foreign owner. What's the problem with that?

7:31You use Spotify, don't you? That has a Swedish owner. It was a short hearing. It was just a couple hours. And both sides are asking for a decision by December. So we should be hearing pretty soon what happens. And so when we do find out what happens, is that the final word? They can appeal. They can appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Who knows if they will take it or not. But if the appeals review just defer to what happened in this courtroom, that's it. That's it. Like who stands to win and lose if the court decides this law should be upheld and TikTok does get banned? Yeah, I think it's fairly obvious.

8:07Meta, right? Meta has Reels, which is a TikTok copycat. YouTube has Shorts, so Google would also benefit. If you can think of a social media app now that doesn't have short form video, they sure will launch it if TikTok is banned. It's going to create this massive land grab because if TikTok has shown us anything, it's that video is kind of the future. So obviously TikTok does not want to get banned in the U.S. with 170 million some users here. But also that's kind of a small fraction of what is it, two billion or so users that TikTok has around the world. Yeah, that's right. How much do you really think TikTok cares like if it ends up losing this case and getting banned?

8:49I mean, more than 90 % of TikTok's users are outside of the U.S., right? And so TikTok knows this, and some might say, you know, Americans need TikTok more than TikTok needs Americans, right? It's a hit in the U.S., but it's a hit around the globe. We've been talking to tech reporter Bobby Allen. Bobby, thanks again for joining us. Thanks, Adrian. This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim with engineering by Valentina Rodriguez-Sanchez. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Cannon edits the show, and the indicators are production of NPR.