This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on March 13th, 2024. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
This is about politics more than technology as the US House of Representatives voted to ban TikTok. Much suggests the bill will not become reality.
When American TikTok users opened their app last week, they were not met with the usual lip-syncing to music. Instead, they were greeted with a black screen reading “Stop a TikTok shutdown.” Below it sat a red button with a phone receiver and the instruction: “Call now.”
US lawmakers were flooded with calls from angry TikTok users worried that their entertainment — and in some cases their livelihood — was about to be taken away.
The calls were not enough. After passing through a committee in the US House of Representatives with the remarkable vote of 50-0, the full House voted on Wednesday. There too, both sides of the political spectrum agreed that TikTok could be considered a risk to US national security, and should therefore be sold or banned outright.
The bill is written specifically for TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance. If it passes all stages, ByteDance would have only 165 days to divest TikTok. But there is much to suggest this will take considerably longer — if it ever gets that far.
Scepticism towards TikTok is nothing new. As far back as 2020, then-President Donald Trump said his administration was examining options to ban the app in the US. It ended in a kind of compromise, with TikTok promising to separate data from American users and store it on US soil, with database company Oracle ensuring it was not misused.
Two years ago, in 2022, the migration of American user data began under what TikTok called “Project Texas.” The arrangement was on track to be completed.
But it did not stop there. In 2023, President Joe Biden banned TikTok from government phones, and the state of Montana banned the app entirely. Montana’s decision was subsequently struck down by a federal court that ruled it violated freedom of speech.
Trying to ban TikTok again now is therefore far from straightforward — despite unusually broad political consensus on the issue.
The committee that drafted the bill is called the “Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party,” which suggests which motives have been strongest in driving it forward. When Republican politician Mike Gallagher was appointed committee chairman in December 2022, he said: “Even in a divided government, we have an opportunity to build a united front against the aggressions of the Chinese Communist Party.”
In an election year, few politicians want to risk being associated with China — and Gallagher may have found exactly that in TikTok. Voting against TikTok becomes a clear way to signal that.
The bill still faces a difficult path. It must first be taken up and voted through the Senate — which is not a given. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised to look at it, but no vote has been scheduled. Several Republicans have also expressed doubts about a ban — including Donald Trump, who now appears to have changed his position on the issue.
If it nonetheless passes the Senate — and President Biden signs it, which he has indicated he would — a legal challenge is almost certain to follow. The Montana case suggests this could be difficult. And if nothing else, such a process would take a long time.
One plausible outcome is therefore some form of compromise. ByteDance will not be able to continue exactly as before, but there are paths forward. A complete ban is unlikely. A sale is conceivable, but given that the app is valued at a minimum of 500 billion kronor, the list of plausible buyers is short. The very largest — Meta, for example — would happily buy it. But such a deal would never be approved on competition grounds.
One variant would be for parent company ByteDance to list TikTok on the US stock market. Ownership would then be distributed across many more shareholders, with new major investors entering the picture. ByteDance might then be permitted to remain as a minority shareholder.
Whatever happens, we are unlikely to get any definitive answer on TikTok’s future before the US election in November.
A new Pew Research study showed that 58 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 use TikTok every day. 17 percent of them said they do so “almost constantly.” They cannot vote yet — but the app has around 170 million users in the US. Upsetting that many people in an election year is something few politicians are willing to do.
