Is this the last dance for TikTok?
This Sunday, the popular social media application TikTok could be shut down in the United States when a bipartisan federal law signed by President Joe Biden in April goes into effect. The application will reportedly “go dark” and shut down completely for users based in the U.S. once the ban takes effect, provoking outrage from TikTok fans across the nation — and at Duke.
“By its very definition, it's a very fascist way of doing government when you try to put a hold on public, free information,“ junior Abby Spear said. “I feel like the fact that the government is able to do this and is currently in the process of doing it is a very bad look for our democracy.”
Two days before the intended ban is slated to occur, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the law signed by Biden. The Friday ruling came after President-elect Donald Trump requested that the court delay implementing the law until he enters office.
The ban could be averted if ByteDance sells the application to an American-owned company, and many billionaires and investors have reportedly offered to step in. But the likelihood of an eleventh-hour save is still in question, and ByteDance itself has claimed that such a sale is not feasible.
Before the application’s fate is decided, The Chronicle is here with information on how we got here and what the future might look like for TikTok fanatics on campus.
Why is TikTok getting banned?
The U.S. government has justified the ban by labeling the application a national security threat. Because its parent company, technology firm ByteDance, Ltd., is based in Beijing, lawmakers are concerned that TikTok may have to hand over user data to the Chinese government. Chinese authorities have disputed this claim, arguing that the government has not and will never require companies to “collect or provide data, information or intelligence” from foreign countries.
The nationwide move followed an anti-TikTok push from the Biden administration, which banned the application from federal devices in February 2023. Many Republican-led states followed the administration’s lead and banned TikTok on government-issued devices, and Montana became the first state to institute a total ban of the application in May 2023.
Is data privacy a real concern?
Per Robyn Caplan, assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy who studies platform governance, even if it is, she does not believe banning TikTok is the answer.
“From a national security perspective, if what you're concerned about is data privacy, [banning TikTok] is really not going to do much anyway,” she said. “What we need is federal data privacy legislation.”
She asserted that the data that can be accessed through TikTok can be bought “from anywhere,” adding that if officials are concerned about the platform’s ability to monitor government employees, a better strategy would be instating bans on government-owned devices.
According to Aaron Dinin, senior lecturing fellow for Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship, data privacy is not the issue at hand anyway.
Instead, he argued that content manipulation presents a bigger problem. Because many people consume their news and information from TikTok, he cautioned that the platform — and its owner — could “control sentiment and how people see the world.”
“It’s not like every video you see is going to be ‘China is amazing, and the U.S. is horrible,’” he explained. “What it is, is [that] mixed with all your favorite creators is the occasional anti-government video that you linger on a little longer, and slowly over time, you start to push a population in a direction.”
Does the ban violate the First Amendment?
The unsigned 20-page order issued Friday by SCOTUS stated that the ban-or-sale law does not violate TikTok users’ right to free speech.
Two weeks after the law was signed by Biden, TikTok and ByteDance had sued the U.S. government in May, challenging the law’s constitutionality. The attempt was originally unsuccessful, as a federal appeals court upheld the ban in a Dec. 6 ruling. TikTok then asked for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
The court heard arguments for the case Jan. 10. The U.S. government defended the law on the grounds that TikTok’s ownership could allow the Chinese government to harvest data from American citizens and conduct disinformation campaigns. On the opposing side, TikTok argued that the law violates the First Amendment rights of the application — which is an American company — and its 170 million U.S. users.
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Representing the Biden administration, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that the ban does not restrict speech on TikTok, which would operate without government interference if ByteDance divests.
According to Caplan, proponents of the ban have also claimed that the law does not violate the First Amendment right to freedom of speech because TikTok users have the option to use other applications to express themselves. However, she doesn’t think this argument holds water.
“Each platform that we use comes with its own set of affordances and own infrastructures. So, the communities that people have made on TikTok are very specific to TikTok,” Caplan said. “… When they’re saying that people could just go to another outlet, that does not mean that their speech, their expression that they had specifically on TikTok is going to be preserved elsewhere.”
“[The ban’s supporters are] trying to make it into an issue about ownership, but it seems very clear to me that it’s about speech,” she continued.
Could the ban be stopped?
Arguably the simplest route to stop the ban, which several members of Congress have expressed support for, would be for ByteDance to divest the company. At this point, though, a sale seems unlikely.
Another route would have been for the Supreme Court to step in before Sunday to overturn or delay the lower court’s December ruling upholding the ban, though the court decided Friday not to do so.
President-elect Donald Trump had requested that SCOTUS issue an injunction to postpone the law from taking effect until after his inauguration on Monday. While he was originally in favor of banning TikTok, the president-elect has since shifted gears after meeting with a Republican megadonor with a stake in ByteDance. He has also been reported as saying that young people “will go crazy without” the app.
Before the Supreme Court released its decision, Caplan pointed out that “it would be kind of worrying if Trump was to just not implement a law that has been passed by Congress, regardless of how much we want to have TikTok.”
Trump could, however, provide ByteDance with more time to conduct the divestiture of TikTok, a notion that has also gained traction in Congress.
On Tuesday, Senators Edward Markey, D-Mass., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Cory Booker, D-N.J. and Rep. Ro Khanna, CA-17, introduced legislation that would postpone the deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok by 270 days. Caplan stated that if the bill passes, it could provide Congress with an opportunity to repeal the ban or revise its contents.
Trump is also reportedly considering issuing an executive order that would allow TikTok to function in the U.S. until ByteDance sells the application to an American company.
Dinin linked Trump’s support of the TikTok ban to a potential interest in putting pressure on Meta, which has long been a TikTok competitor. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently implemented a number of changes to his platforms, reportedly in an attempt to appeal to the incoming administration, including scrapping its fact-checking program and loosening content restrictions on its platforms. Trump has previously clashed with Meta, after the tech giant suspended his Facebook account in 2021 following the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“A lot of people are focused on the policy shifts [Zuckerberg is] enacting,” Dinin said. “I find myself wondering more if it was a very strategic move by incoming President Trump to say, ‘Hey, you know, I might support this TikTok ban in order to bring Meta to heel.’”
Meta stands to profit the most from a TikTok ban out of all other social media platforms, as Instagram and Facebook would win an estimated 22.4% and 17.1% of TikTok’s ad revenue respectively. The company spent a record $7.6 million on lobbying the federal government in the first three months of 2024 while Congress advanced the TikTok ban legislation.
How might Duke be affected?
Amid the political handwringing in Washington, many Blue Devils are dreading the impending shutdown, fearing that they’ll lose out on a critical source of information and medium for social connection.
Sophomore Emma Smith said TikTok acts as a source of “pop culture information, and also lifestyle tips, cooking recipes [and] life hacks,” especially for Gen Z.
“I think we're losing a way to get breaking news, sometimes unbiased news, and I think it's also a big damper on free speech,” she said.
Caplan echoed this sentiment, referencing the role TikTok played in spreading information about the recent floods in western North Carolina.
“For my students, they really found out about the flooding through TikTok. They found out about things like wildfires through TikTok,” she said. “That is all news content that they won't have access to.”
The platform has also played an important role in spreading campus news. Senior Zhibo Huang, a line monitor, said that the Krzyzewskiville organizers often use TikTok to inform the Duke community about activities or events related to tenting and Duke men’s basketball.
Spear stated that sending her friends TikToks is oftentimes her preferred “way of communicating,” especially when the semester ramps up.
“We don’t really have time to talk, so I see TikToks and I’ll send it to them when it reminds me of them,” she said.
Caplan also pointed out the platform’s research value. She said that many academics and students conduct research on TikTok due to the “enormous amount of cultural politics” taking place on the application, which they would no longer have access to if the ban takes effect.
Caplan encouraged students who feel strongly about the ban to make their voices heard to their representatives, no matter which side they are on.
“I think it's going to impact our lives greatly,” she said. “Students need to know that this is unprecedented. We've never had a ban with a social media company before.”
What about creators?
According to Dinin, TikTok boasts features that are “better than anything out there” in terms of technology that simplifies the creation process and empowers amateur creators to produce content with ease, such as the platform’s green screen effect and compatibility with the CapCut editing tool. He worried that a ban could disparately advantage more professional creators due to a lack of built-in editing tools on platforms like YouTube or Instagram, which boast comparable video-sharing services like Shorts and Reels.
“There is going to be a bigger barrier to entry to creating content,” Dinin said, adding that he was concerned for his student creators who “aren’t particularly well prepared” for the ban.
Dinin, who teaches social marketing at Duke and is a social media creator himself, said he was surprised by how many of those students were unaware that the ban is scheduled to go into effect soon.
“I already moved over to Reels about a year and a half ago and really committed to that being my platform,” Dinin said. “… I've been encouraging my creators and my students to get serious about [switching platforms] because it seems like [the ban] might happen.”
TikTok offers users the opportunity to download their data from the application, including videos created, comments, browsing history and other account information.
Could TikTok be replaced?
“Attention is a limited asset,” Dinin said. “That attention is going to go somewhere, and what it'll do is it'll probably dissipate across a series of different apps.”
As the ban looms closer, many TikTok users are migrating to RedNote out of protest. Also known as Xiaohongshu, the Chinese-owned application designed for people fluent in Mandarin offers similar video-sharing features to TikTok. The popular language-learning application Duolingo reported a 216% increase in users learning Mandarin compared to this time last year, as well as a 7% rise of its share value following the uptick in RedNote users.
“What these users are kind of testing, it seems, is whether this ban was something that was directed towards national security concerns — towards China — or whether it was directed towards TikTok specifically because of the threat it posed to the dominance of other U.S. tech companies,” Caplan said.
Whether users will also move to applications owned by U.S. tech companies is unknown. Caplan observed that while users are starting to use YouTube more, she has not seen a “big migration” to Instagram reels.
While TikTok has been banned in many countries like China and India, Caplan argued that there are ways for users to get around such bans by using VPNs, or virtual private networks, which allow users to bypass restrictions to online sites through location spoofing and masked IP addresses. However, she pointed out that VPNs come with a monthly fee, meaning TikTok would no longer operate as a “free, accessible service.”
For Dinin, what distinguishes TikTok from other social media platforms is its “magical algorithm,” which he terms as “the truth serum,” since it is able to figure out a user’s interests — sometimes faster than they can.
“I’m going to miss that if we don't have that anymore,” Dinin said. “There's a lot of good opportunities to get exposed to things that you didn't know were in the world, and no one else does that as well as TikTok does.”
Editor's note: This article was updated Friday morning to reflect the Supreme Court's ruling on the ban-or-sale law signed by Biden.
Ishita Vaid is a Trinity junior and a senior editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.