Arija Martin, a junior studying international relations, has to limit her TikTok use to once or twice a week to prevent herself from scrolling through the app for hours.
Siena Woolf, a freshman studying business administration, uses TikTok to decompress from a long day of classes and distract herself from work.
Greg Martinez, a freshman studying biochemistry, uses TikTok to watch the latest sports highlights and learn a little more about the world around him.
However, if a bill — which some political experts believe is likely to pass the Senate this week — is placed on the desk of the president, Martin, Woolf, Martinez and more than 170 million Americans are going to have to find a different social media platform to use.
On April 22, the House of Representatives passed a bill stating that Chinese company ByteDance would have nine months to sell TikTok or be banned in the U.S.
This bill is a revised version of one that the House passed on March 13. It proposed to ban the social media app if ByteDance did not find a seller in 180 days after the bill was passed. On March 8, President Joe Biden told reporters that if the bill passed through Congress he would sign it.
The new bill extends the time to sell the company with an option for the president to extend the timeframe to a full year and was combined with aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. According to the New York Times, The bill was added to “sweeten the deal” for conservatives and pass the larger aid package.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), one of the bill’s main sponsors, said in an address to Congress on March 13 that TikTok’s Chinese owners could threaten the security of American data and influence its citizens.
“TikTok is a threat to our national security because it is owned by ByteDance, which does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party,” Gallagher said. “We know this because ByteDance leadership says so and because Chinese law says so.”
Professor Clifford Neuman, the director of USC’s Center for Computer Systems Security, said the ban is not the most effective way to reduce the risk of Chinese interference in American data.
“There are other ways that people get at this data. In particular, we’ve had data breaches at all of the other social media sites,” Neuman said. “They could find it on the dark web or could have their hackers break into any of these other sites or things like that, so [the bill is] not really an effective solution to that particular problem.”
Neuman agrees that TikTok’s ranking algorithm is concerning. He said Chinese control of the app could lead to a situation “where [TikTok] has more authority to censor things within the U.S. than even the federal government does.”
Banning TikTok could create a host of its own problems, whether it be hurting small businesses that advertise on the platform or the free speech concerns that students and experts have raised. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) cited small businesses as a reason he voted against the first bill in a statement released on X (formerly Twitter).
“Small businesses and creatives across L.A. make their livelihoods out of content creation,” Gomez said.
TikTok and other social media platforms have been widely used as tools for sharing breaking news or information on world events for young people.
“This ban always seems to come up when there’s been a mass spread of information about the U.S. government or other government systems,” said Martin, who watches dance videos and consumes nostalgic content on TikTok. “I could be wrong, but I feel like this came right after people were advocating so heavily for Palestine and showing what’s actually going on… versus what’s being shown on the news.”
Sarah Neff, a content strategist at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative said that TikTok has also helped humanize certain events, allowing them to learn more about the world.
“I think you could learn more about lived experiences than you could in a more educational context,” Neff said. “People, they cut up videos to be shorter, so it’s more consumable.”
Neuman disagrees with ByteDance citing free speech and information as reasons to keep the app operating in the U.S.
“While the argument might, in my view, make sense in sort of the constitutional framework here within the U.S., it’s disingenuous in that already most U.S. social media apps are banned in China,” Neuman said. “It’s a little bit funny, them crying foul on the free speech issue, but it’s the fiction of trying to separate the company from the government that has control over the company.”
One added benefit of banning the social media app could be alleviating some of the mental health concerns that the app brings. Lisa Dittmer, a researcher for Amnesty International, revealed in a report that TikTok can create problems in children’s mental health.
“The platform’s algorithmic content recommender system, credited with enabling the rapid global rise of the platform, exposes children and young adults with pre-existing mental health challenges to serious risks of harm,” Dittmer said.
Woolf, who used to post on the app regularly, sees this content and these issues on her and her sister’s For You pages as well.
“From what I’ve experienced, also through COVID, you can fall into a niche,” Woolf said. “And what young girls generally tend to fall into in the negative sense could be eating disorders, and it just bounces off of each other because of the algorithm.”
ByteDance has said they will fight the ban in court if the bill were to pass, but if TikTok wasn’t sold and the ban was to go into effect, what would it look like?
The ban would not remove TikTok from all devices in the U.S. but would instead prevent the app from continuing to be downloaded and improved within the country. The bill prohibits “providing services to distribute, maintain, or update” through an electronic marketplace (the App Store) and “providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution [and] maintenance” of the app.
Those who already have the app could keep it in its current form, but the company would not be able to fix any of the app’s potential problems or update any features.
Neuman said that in order to better protect American data, the industry as a whole needs to be better regulated, rather than singling out one company.
“We need stronger regulations on what can be done and what can be collected and how that data is processed across the board, not just by TikTok, but by all social media sites, by data brokers and everything else,” Neuman said.
Neuman cites the GDPR as what the U.S. should do to better regulate big data companies. The General Protection Data Regulation (GDPR) is a sweeping piece of legislation that, among other things, limits the collection of personal data by entities and enforces transparency between data collectors, users and regulatory bodies.
While the future of TikTok and other foreign-controlled apps is unclear, the banning of TikTok would be historic and likely an issue in the upcoming election. Former President Donald Trump reversed his initial position in favor of banning the app, saying in an interview with CNBC that he would not support Congress banning it.