Russia fined TikTok for not removing banned content. Romania’s presidential election results were thrown out amid concerns that the app had been used to spread foreign influence. Albania banned TikTok for a year after a teenager was stabbed to death by another teenager after the two got into an online fight.
“Either TikTok protects the children of Albania, or Albania will protect its children from TikTok”, said Prime Minister Edi Rama in X.
That was all just in the last month.
This week in the United States, where about 150 million people use the app, TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, are asking the Supreme Court to strike down a law that would force the app to be sold or banned.
TikTok has faced legal and political scrutiny around the world in recent years, facing full or partial bans in at least 20 countries as governments have been alarmed by its ties to China and its far-reaching influence, particularly among young people.
Despite the growing scrutiny, TikTok remains incredibly popular around the world. More than a billion people use the app every month.
TikTok’s innovation comes from its proprietary algorithm, which recommends a constant stream of content, mostly short videos, calibrated to keep people moving. ByteDance started the technology in 2016 with TikTok’s sister app Douyin, which has become one of China’s most popular apps and drives most of the company’s revenue. ByteDance knew it could be a hit overseas and launched TikTok in 2017.
But as TikTok’s algorithm drew worldwide attention, it alarmed lawmakers, who say TikTok has quickly turned from a realm of cat videos and dance trends into a potentially disruptive social, political and economic force.
Officials from Montana to New Zealand have warned that TikTok can be used to incite violence, spread false information and worsen mental health. Lawmakers also worry that TikTok could share user data such as location and browsing history with the Chinese government. Young people must be protected from the “terrible traps of the algorithm”, said Mr. Rama, the Albanian Prime Minister.
TikTok has insisted that the concerns are overblown. It has teams dedicated to combating influence operations, whose work it makes public, the company said in a statement. TikTok’s algorithm, which aims to “maintain content neutrality,” ranks content based on what users express interest in, the company said.
TikTok has said that ByteDance is majority owned by global investors. At the same time, the Chinese government has claimed the authority to oppose any sale.
As other Chinese companies look to do more business overseas, TikTok has become both a role model and a cautionary tale. The app showed that a new type of entertainment first popularized in China could spread elsewhere. But it also paved the way for offenses against Chinese apps like Temu and Shein.
“It feels like every Chinese entrepreneur needs a degree in political science or international relations to be able to navigate their future now,” said Kevin Xu, the US-based founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in artificial intelligence technologies.
Other companies with global Internet products, such as Meta and Google, also face worldwide scrutiny, said Jianggan Li, chief executive of Momentum Works, a consultancy in Singapore. “But being an American company, they don’t face the distrust that TikTok has faced in the eyes of politicians and regulators in the West,” said Mr. Li.
Here’s how governments have gone after TikTok.
Total ban: India and Nepal
A ban in the United States could cut off TikTok from one of its most important markets. But TikTok has already gone through the experience of losing what was at the time its biggest audience. The Indian government banned the app in 2020 after India’s geopolitical conflict with China escalated into hand-to-hand fighting along their shared border.
TikTok disappeared from app stores and its website was blocked, forcing creators who had made their living on the app to rebuild their audiences on other platforms. Several domestic alternatives emerged, but US tech giants were the biggest winners. Both YouTube and Instagram now have roughly twice as many users in India as in the United States.
Officials in neighboring Nepal took TikTok offline for nearly a year because of its refusal to curb content the government described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” The ban was lifted in August after the current chief minister, KP Sharma Oli, took charge of the government for the fourth time.
Fines and local binding ties: Russia and Indonesia
The Russian government has repeatedly fined TikTok for allowing the circulation of content that does not respect the country’s censorship rules, including topics such as sex, gender and feminism. The two most recent fines, imposed by Russian courts in the past six months, rose to around $90,000.
In Indonesia, TikTok launched online shopping, which it is betting on as a new revenue stream. The app has almost as many users in Indonesia, the largest country in Southeast Asia, as in the United States. But in 2023, the government passed a law that forced TikTok to shut down its online shopping business within days.
The TikTok store was only able to reopen after merging operations with Indonesia’s largest e-commerce company, Tokopedia. It’s been slow for many store owners rebuilding their audiences, but for TikTok, the ordeal came with a payoff: access to a network of shipping drivers and logistics services built to get packages across Indonesia’s 17,000 islands.
Blocked on government devices: Taiwan, Britain, Canada and others
Some governments have tried to balance TikTok’s security concerns with free expression.
Taiwan banned the app from government devices in 2019. But officials say they are not considering a wholesale ban because they don’t want to stifle Taiwan’s culture of public debate. Britain, Australia and France, as well as the executive arm of the European Union and the Parliament of New Zealand, have adopted the same approach.
TikTok was already banned from government-issued mobile devices in Canada when the government ordered TikTok to close its offices in the country in November, citing national security risks posed by ByteDance.
In documents filed in Canadian court last month to challenge the order, TikTok claimed that the Canadian government had ordered it to delay the delayed documents until the United States had decided on its approach to the company.
