Teal Lehto launched her TikTok career with a 2-minute video about drought in the West. There was no dancing, no memes, no catchy soundbites. Just Lehto, speaking honestly and sounding slightly annoyed.
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Why is the government trying to ban TikTok?
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, has faced threats to its U.S. market for the past four years, since the first Trump administration tried to boot TikTok by executive order. That began a flurry of legal and legislative debates that have persisted throughout the Biden administration, resulting in a “sale-or-ban” law, which is set to take effect the day before Trump begins his second term.
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That’s part of what bothers skeptics of the ban, who fear it singles out TikTok while ignoring the underlying issue of American data protection, or lack thereof. Temu, a Chinese-owned shopping company, for instance, was the most downloaded free app from the Apple store in 2024. TikTok ranked third.
A few dissenting Representatives tried to point this out.
“Let’s say you have an entity over here that divests. What makes them not then take the data, sell it to a data broker, and it gets washed and ends up still in the bad actors’ hands?” Arizona Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican, asked the committee. “You have to understand, there’s even articles out this week of our own three-letter agencies buying their data now from data brokers instead of doing the tracking. We need to think dramatically, more globally.”
Opponents also note banning TikTok provides a competitive advantage to companies like Google and Meta with their own video platforms, and third-party services still can purchase data that tells them just about anything they want to know about a consumer.
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