When faced with a choice between national security and a brain-rotting, never-ending scroll of entertainment that keeps us glued to our phones and thoroughly divorced from our real lives, Americans are clear: we want the brain rot, even if it means the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is able to use an app to track our movements, read our messages and mine our contacts. More ominously, our newly-installed president Donald Trump is clear, too, that any claims he has made to caring about American security in the face of powerful privacy-invading adversaries are spurious – or at least easily assuaged by his own interests in influence, money, and power.
The last few weeks have been a real rollercoaster for American TikTok users. After Congress passed a law in April 2024 with bipartisan support banning TikTok in the US because of the serious national security risks posed by the app’s Chinese ownership, TikTok sued, and the case this month went to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments pitching safety interests against free speech concerns. On 17 January the court upheld the ban, ruling that the app’s parent company, ByteDance, would have to sell to a non-Chinese company in order to prevent any TikTok content being blocked in the US. Days later, American TikTok went offline, at least for a while, with a message telling users that the app was banned, but that the company is “fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office”. The message was clear, although perhaps not exactly heartening to sceptics: this is a company clearly well-versed in pleasing and appeasing authoritarian leaders.
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