TikTok Is Its Own Worst Enemy

The video-sharing app has received unfair treatment in Washington. But the company’s biggest wounds are self-inflicted.

I was really rooting for TikTok.

In 2020, when the Trump administration first tried to force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or risk having it shut down, I argued that banning TikTok in the United States would do more harm than good.

Why? Partly because TikTok seemed like a convenient scapegoat for problems — invasive data collection, opaque content policies, addictive recommendation algorithms — that plagued all the big social media apps, and partly because I never bought the argument that the app was a Chinese spying tool hiding in plain sight.

I’m still skeptical of that argument. If the Chinese government wanted to snoop on Americans through their smartphones, it wouldn’t have to use TikTok to do it. It could buy troves of information from a data broker, thanks to America’s nonexistent federal data privacy laws.

And I’m still worried that banning TikTok would be a huge gift to U.S. tech giants like Meta and Google, which own TikTok’s largest competitors — Facebook, Instagram and YouTube — further entrenching winners in a market that already has too little competition.

But over the past few weeks, as a bipartisan bill that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok hurtled toward passage in Congress, I’ve warmed up to the idea that banning TikTok, or forcing its sale, is probably a good idea.