On the American TikTok Ban
08/27/25

I am engaging in few panels over the weekend. One panel is on the topic of the TikTok ban. So to better organize my thoughts, I'm writing here about them. There are way better articles to read on this. Like the Atlantic Council's various reports. These are just my scribbles.

What is ByteDance anyways?

The company ByteDance was founded in Beijing in March 2012 by Zhang Yiming. Their first product was a news aggregation application. Their second main stream product was Douyin in 2016. Later, in 2017 they bought the American app Musical.ly and it eventually became TikTok.

TikTok's revolutionary difference

Paraphrasing Patreon founder and musician, Jack Conte, TikTok is a bit different than other platforms in that it aggregated content based on your in app behavior. At the time, around 2020 [double check], this was abnormal. Instagram and other platforms aggregated content based on which content creators you chose to follow, and eventually ranked your follower's content based on your preferences, however TikTok de-prioritizes the users' following preference in favor for the users actually behavior.

On its surface, there seems to be no malicious intent behind the app. It simply is another platform that acquires attention and sells it to advertiser. The biggest difference is that ByteDance implemented machine learning and a novel way to capture attention, which, technologically speaking, is pretty cool. At the same time, it's effect on our population is concerning (more on that later). Two things, though can be true at the same time though.

Is TikTok Chinese owned or not?

TikTok has taken measure to appear to be disassociated with the CCP. The data centers are often cited as being located in Europe, the US, and Singapore. ByteDance has separated operations so that it is, seemingly, run entirely by teams outside of China. And, the CEO is from Singapore.

Despite this, ByteDance currently owns 100% of TikTok. 20% of ByteDance is owned by its founder and Chinese investors. 60% is owned by global investors like BlackRock. And the founder retains over 50% of voting rights.

So, its not entirely conclusive how much influence the CCP has on TikTok.

What risk does TikTok expose America to?

With bipartisan support, the laws which attempted to ban TikTok were passed, though every time they were blocked by courts. A majority of the attempts were blocked because to ban TikTok would set a precedence that applications were not speech. This, I believe is the biggest issue. I perform the same action to write this article as I would to build an app like TikTok and implement its machine learning algorithms. So, to me its a speech issue. But does the harms of TikTok warrant making a free speech exception to ban it?

I think the threat comes down to this. TikTok is successful at capturing attention and holding it. So much so that other platforms have implemented their techniques just to compete. In order to be so successful, they must capture a lot of data from the user. And they do so with accuracy. So TikTok likely knows more about its users than other platforms. And its device-level data according to Citizen Lab. In the wrong hands, this data could be used to track (or attract) specific types of users and maliciously deliver messages (Ala targeted advertising and disinformation campaigns) or attack them in other ways.

So, does the risk posed by TikTok warrant the ban?

I feel strongly, however, that a ban of TikTok would place it in a category it does not belong. While it is a technology, it is also, and primarily a program. Characters being evaluated by a machine to deliver an output. Without more evidence of foreign influence, I believe banning TikTok would invite banning other applications and eventually lead to unjust regulation of applications that may prevent innovation, or worse, prevent solutions to society problems from being spread due to "preserved threat" (as evaluated by the people in charge at the time).

Those are my thoughts.