TikTok Shouldn’t Be Banned, But It Still Values Profit Over Privacy

The shutdown only lasted a few hours, but it generated no shortage of content.

“Fascist countries ban apps. Fascist countries ban websites,” one TikTok user said in a video with more than 12 million views. “TikTok was never just an app. It was a battleground and a sanctuary,” another creator wrote in a viral Instagram post.

Similar sentiments proliferated across social media in the days and weeks leading up to TikTok’s brief black-out on Sunday. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, paused the app’s services in the United States after the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a federal law that aims to ban TikTok, classifying it as a dangerous “foreign adversary controlled application.” ByteDance must sell TikTok to a U.S. company, a bipartisan slate of Congressional members decided, or shut down by January 19.

The TikTok ban sparked rightful outrage from civil liberties and free speech advocates, who’ve noted that shutting down entire platforms is a tactic favored by anti-democratic regimes. But the response across social media has often trended toward careless oversimplification — in protesting TikTok’s shutdown, creators have uplifted the platform as a bastion of progressive thought and left activism. What this full-throated embrace misses is that TikTok, like any other platform owned by a multibillion-dollar tech giant, was never intended to serve the public interest. It is at best an imperfect tool. And the debacle over the app’s future underscores how imperative it is that we look beyond these platforms if we are to build lasting social movements.

Within hours of going offline, TikTok returned with a message: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” The about-face arrived before Trump was inaugurated, but after he’d promised to sign an executive action temporarily halting the app’s shutdown — never mind that he was the first elected official to attempt banning it. Trump’s pivot, a clear ploy to curry favor with the country’s youth, shows the TikTok ban for what it is: Sinophobic fearmongering masked as national security. And both Republicans and Democrats are culpable.

In August 2020, Trump signed an executive action ordering ByteDance to divest its U.S. holdings or face sanctions, stating that TikTok “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.” A federal judge blocked Trump’s order, but Congress was happy to pick up the baton, passing a bill that President Joe Biden later signed into law.

In reality, any national security risk posed by TikTok is largely speculative. In 2022, a Forbes investigation found that, in at least two cases, an internal team at ByteDance had planned to use TikTok data to monitor the location of specific U.S. users, but it’s unknown whether that data was actually collected. A year later, a former ByteDance employee alleged that the Chinese government had used TikTok to spy on protesters in Hong Kong. But the fear that the Chinese government obtains reams of data about U.S. citizens from TikTok remains unproven, and these isolated testimonies are hardly a smoking gun for a mass surveillance campaign.

“The United States’ foreign foes easily can steal, scrape, or buy Americans’ data by countless other means,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, wrote in a statement on the Supreme Court’s ruling. “The ban or forced sale of one social media app will do virtually nothing to protect Americans’ data privacy.”

Of course, if U.S. citizens are really concerned about surveillance, they need not look abroad for examples of tech companies infringing on digital privacy. Twitter, and its later Elon Musk-owned iteration, X, has long partnered with the artificial intelligence company Dataminr, which supplies social media monitoring data to police agencies. In 2020, for instance, Dataminr helped law enforcement officials digitally surveil protesters at Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Twitter/X have facilitated such spying by selling Dataminr an unfiltered feed of every public piece of information shared by its users.

In addition to police surveillance, the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit democracy think tank, has expressed concerns about the U.S. government’s unregulated and growing use of social media to spy on citizens, spanning many federal agencies, from the Drug Enforcement Administration to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This can include tools like Dataminr, public social media monitoring or obtaining warrants for backdoor searches of private communications, location data and other sensitive information.

So, does the all-pervasive nature of digital surveillance in the modern age mean that every platform should get a free pass? Far from it. Singling out TikTok in the name of China-bashing is wrong, but what’s clear is that users don’t have an expectation of privacy on any app, regardless of what major company owns it. We deserve better, comprehensive data protections — a cohesive framework aimed at ensuring everyone’s freedom of speech and right to privacy — not piecemeal bans intended to sow fear.

Then there’s the issue of censorship. It’s interesting to see creators’ recent reframing of TikTok as a tool for subverting oppressive state interests, when many of those same creators engage in “algospeak,” or linguistic substitutions that supposedly evade algorithmic censorship. On the platform, “sex” is overwhelmingly written as “seggs,” “kill” is “unalive,” “sexual assault” is “S.A.” and lesbian becomes “le$bean” or “le dollar bean,” among many other neologisms. Creators have said that TikTok suppresses pro-Palestine content, while Republican lawmakers claim the app is influencing young people to “support Hamas.”

Perhaps all of the above can be true at once. TikTok’s algorithm is, after all, a black box — and this is also not unique. TikTok algospeak has spread to Meta-owned Instagram and Facebook, though the extent to which those platforms punish certain words is also unclear. What’s more, the parameters for censored content are subject to frequent change, often at the whims of tech companies’ billionaire executives.

On January 8, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that it would replace its third-party fact-checking process on Instagram and Facebook with a crowdsourced “community notes” system. While Zuckerberg claimed the change would foster free speech, critics point out how the billionaire is sucking up to the incoming president, who has long decried Facebook’s moderation policies. Trump ally and megadonor Elon Musk implemented a similar community notes system when he took ownership of Twitter.

Alongside the elimination of fact-checking, Meta has also expanded its guidelines on what users are free to post. Newly permissible speech includes hateful and derogatory remarks about immigrants, LGBTQ people, racial minorities and ethnic groups, internal documents recently obtained by The Intercept reveal. Meta already had a track record of censoring content supporting Palestine and using inconsistent standards for content restriction across groups that call for violence. The new policies mirror the ones Musk put in place after his takeover of Twitter in 2022, which was accompanied by a rise in hate speech and increased engagement on far right accounts.

The chaos of the TikTok ban, the shifting Meta policies and the odiousness of Musk-owned X are all symptoms of the same broader paradox. The platforms we use to receive and disseminate information, express ourselves and foster human connections are beholden to state and corporate interests outside of our control. Safeguarding access to them is crucial for ensuring free speech, and yet that speech is never truly free — always regulated by a black box of algorithms, always harvested and sold by profit-seeking companies. Many of us know this, of course, but the politicization of the TikTok ban has sparked a social media frenzy that risks drowning out more complex truths.

On Monday, Musk, Zuckerberg, and other major tech executives, with a collective net worth of $1.3 trillion, attended Trump’s inauguration. They were seated in front of the incoming president’s own cabinet picks. Also present at the Capitol Rotunda was none other than TikTok CEO Shou Chew.