TikTok’s future in the US has perhaps never been in more doubt than it is right now. Since its introduction to the US in 2018, the short-form video app has been fighting increased scrutiny from US lawmakers about its ties to ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns it.
Concerns that ByteDance could share TikTok user data with China’s government and push disinformation or propaganda through its recommendation algorithm have resulted in partial and mostly symbolic bans. (There’s no evidence, at least not publicly, that this kind of sharing has ever happened.) Most recently, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill that could eventually lead to a ban of the app. There’s a parallel set of concerns that TikTok is dangerous to children and teens, an issue with many social media platforms, that’s been taken up by Congress in the past year. Some states have been eyeing bans of social media platforms in general for kids unless they have parental consent.
The Biden administration has demanded that TikTok’s Chinese owners, ByteDance, divest or sell off their stake in the company. That would take the potential Chinese threat out of the equation entirely — but only if ByteDance and China agree to it.
Follow here for all of Vox’s coverage about TikTok’s fate in the US.
- Imagining an internet without TikTok
- Is the new TikTok ban for real?
- TikTok could avoid a ban with a sale. Finding a buyer won’t be easy.
- It’s not just Gen Z. Here’s what TikTok’s user base tells us about a potential ban’s impact.
- Banning TikTok would be both ineffective and harmful
- Montana’s TikTok ban — and the legal challenge of it — explained
- 9 questions about the attempts to ban TikTok, answered
- The RESTRICT Act is more bad news for TikTok
- Has TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse?
- 3 winners and 3 losers from Congress’s TikTok hearing
- Is TikTok too big to ban?
- The new Congress is enlisting kids in its ongoing fight with Big Tech
- Inside the lonely and surprisingly earnest world of political TikTok
- TikTok’s master plan to win over Washington
- Good luck explaining a TikTok ban to young people
- The US government’s TikTok ban is more complicated than it sounds
- Maybe Trump was right about TikTok
- TikTok’s Trump problem is now TikTok’s Biden problem
- TikTok’s US ban has been delayed another two weeks — or maybe forever
- The bigger stakes of the TikTok debate
- The case for and against banning TikTok
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