TikTok (Temporarily) Banned?
On the evening of January 18th, Americans were banned from accessing the popular social media app TikTok. This is the culmination of a five-year struggle to ban the application which started late in the first presidency of Donald Trump. Now, Donald Trump is poised to become the “savior” of TikTok and its 170 million American users.
The fight to ban TikTok is really a fight to force the parent corporation ByteDance, which is headquartered in China and incorporated in the Cayman Islands, to divest its stake of TikTok to an American company or syndicate of companies. Donald Trump first signed an executive order to have ByteDance divest in July 2020, which was then partially reversed by Biden in 2021. Then president Joe Biden then signed the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” on December 30th, 2022, which banned TikTok from federal government devices. This was followed by the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” which passed both houses of Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Joe Biden on April 24th, 2024, which completely banned TikTok on January 19th, 2025, in the US unless a divestiture was done.
This entire process was not without criticism or backlash. Americans rely on these social media apps, in numerous ways. While many large businesses used TikTok to advertise, many small or medium sized businesses used it too. These small-time business owners were predictably given the larger part of the corporate news cycle’s sympathy. However, most Americans simply used TikTok as a means of entertainment and news. The reliance on TikTok, and social media, for news may reveal the real, sinister reason to divest TikTok to an American firm or syndicate.
TikTok had been repeatedly blasted as “Chinese malware,” or “spy software.” The US government repeatedly alleged that the application was stealing users’ data and sending it to the Chinese government to be exploited. The evidence to these claims was… top secret! However true this might be, the government did not provide any evidence to the US public as it was all “classified.” Hearings about the app that provided evidence took place behind closed doors. The capitalist government told its citizens to simply “trust them.” Nothing wrong has ever happened in this country by blindly trusting, without evidence, the allegations of the government!
The most important pain point for the US government regarding TikTok was the prevalence of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-US news and media on the app. The New York Times claims that the US government is “…worried that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations to fuel misinformation, a concern that escalated in the United States after the start of the Israel-Hamas war and during the presidential election.”1 This nebulous “misinformation” that capitalists of all stripes are worried about is of course the real, honest truth that the Israeli government is waging a war of genocide against the Palestinian people, fully backed by the US government. Both the government and the news media hide behind the label of “misinformation” anything they do not agree with and do not want the people to see.
This fight against “misinformation” was recently prevalent after the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione last December. While the corporate news media and government politicians all acted shocked and surprised by the outpouring of sympathy for the shooter’s motives and the hatred for the health insurance and healthcare industry, anyone who had access to social media could clearly tell who was out of touch with the reality of the everyday American and their struggles to access healthcare.
By divesting TikTok from ByteDance, the government as the representatives of the capitalist class in the country wish to accomplish two main goals: 1) end the pro-Palestine, anti-corporate, and anti-American news and media on TikTok by changing the algorithm under the guise of “protecting Americans’ data,” and 2) eliminate the quasi-foreign control of a major media application which could become a problem if any inter-imperialist conflict were to break out (the ostensible “national security” argument).
Of course, no class-conscious American believes that the capitalist government really cares about their data. This is a country with conglomerates like Meta (which owns Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.), Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), X Corp (formerly Twitter), and more, whose entire business model is the harvesting and selling of people’s data to companies both foreign and domestic. This applies to ByteDance too, which is itself a private corporation which aims to harvest data and sell products. Even non-tech companies are culpable; the car you drive, the watch you wear, the cameras that watch you in stores, are all harvesting and selling your data. This is to say nothing of the government themselves who spy on the American people and violate their privacy through the FBI, NSA, and DHS, for example. The assertion that these corporations and the government care about the integrity of people’s data as some inalienable right is ludicrous and hilarious. The government that passed the Patriot Act cannot seriously state that it cares about privacy concerns.
But it may not be all over for TikTok yet. Due to Biden’s comments saying he would not enforce the ban on the last day of his presidency, and Trump’s comments saying he would not enforce the ban either, TikTok began the process of restoring service to Americans in the afternoon on January 19th. It remains to be seen how permanent this will be.
Donald Trump, ever mindful of the prevailing winds, has come in to “save the day.” Despite starting this whole charade in the first place, Trump changed his mind about banning TikTok after meeting with a billionaire friend of his, Jeff Yass, who owned a large stake in ByteDance. Trump also used TikTok during his 2024 election bid and was successful in doing so. Now Trump is coming in to “save TikTok,” by either delaying the ban or negotiating the divestiture to completion. He is positioning himself as a savior to the American people and will likely be able to spin most of the blame for the temporary ban on the Democratic Party who helped pass the ban bill and signed it into law. Trump in his recent comments claimed he wanted at least a 50% American stake in TikTok, and as the incoming President he will soon have the power and prestige to get the wheels turning on a deal that would likely lead to some form of divestment or joint ownership.
It is as hilarious as it is frustrating to see the capitalist Democrat and Republican politicians who voted for the ban in the first place turn around and claim they never wanted it to be banned. President Joe Biden’s claim that he would not enforce the ban on his last day in office is as outrageous as it is stupid, as he signed the ban in the first place and told the American people how big a threat this application was. Apparently, it’s not so dangerous at all!
It is contradictory that the government that claimed that TikTok was a major national security issue would nonetheless grant temporary stays of execution to such a “dangerous” app. That is because those reasons are all half-truth or lies. If the app were truly so dangerous then it would have been banned outright in 2020 without all these delays. The purpose of the delays is to leave room to negotiate a divestiture or joint ownership agreement. The assertion that TikTok is the largest national security risk ever under these auspices is therefore hilarious: it either shows that the government is blatantly lying to its people about the risk, or that they are the most incompetent people ever known who cannot protect the American people — indeed both are true!
What have we learned from this charade? Media can never be “free” under capitalism. A “free” media, “freedom” of the press, and such liberal values only mean the freedom of the capitalist class to control the media in such ways that suit their liking — why would it be any other way? No capitalist would allow the media they own to print stories that were disadvantageous to them — Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post proves just that! No liberal newspaper would ever print stories that were fatal to their continued existence (their subscriptions, donations, and advertiser revenue) as they would go under and cease operations. Even the most “impartial” and “unbiased” papers rely on money to operate and thus operate in ways to maximize that money — or at least maintain enough to continue existing. This is to say nothing that even the “freest country in the world” with the “strongest freedom of the press protections” can simply ban whatever it wants, as it just proved. The First Amendment and all those liberal values are not worth the paper they were printed on, because they were always fictitious to begin with.
TikTok may very well be more “principled” than Meta when it comes to freedom of speech, the impartiality of their algorithms, and the collection of data, or vice versa, but in both cases they both serve the same corporate interest ultimately and always. A truly free press that acts within the interests of the working people can only be established under a state which is owned by the working class themselves. The capitalist class has their own state and thus their own media. We likewise must have our own state and our own media. Only with the establishment of Socialism-Communism in this country will that happen. The freedom of the press is only achievable when the working class is free from the capitalist system that oppresses them.
[1] Sapna Maheshwari, “What We Know About the TikTok Ban,” The New York Times, Accessed January 19, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-we-know-tiktok.html.