At around 10 p.m. local time on April 23, 2024, the U.S. Senate passed a series of military aid and sanctions bills with 79 votes in favor and 18 votes against, which mainly included military assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and allies in the Indo-Pacific region. Interestingly, restricting TikTok's content is also included in the bill. TikTok's legislation requires China-based ByteDance to divest control of TikTok within 270 days, if the president sees "significant progress" in the divestment, the president has the option to extend the time limit to 360 days, and if it doesn't sell by the deadline, TikTok faces a nationwide ban in the United States.
The legislation regarding TikTok retains the substance of the "Protecting Americans from Apps Controlled by Foreign Adversaries" bill (the "Divestment Act"), which was passed by the House of Representatives on March 13. U.S. President Joe Biden also rushed the Senate and House of Representatives to legislate a series of military bills last week, and said that if Congress passed, he would soon sign the passed bills.
In the six years since it entered the North American market, TikTok, a short video social app that was originally dominated by urban female users, has gradually expanded its influence, and now it has covered all genders and age groups in urban and rural areas, constantly empowering small traders and hawkers, uniting marginalized communities, becoming one of the most mainstream social media, and gradually becoming a symbol of "Chinese power" in the eyes of American politicians. In Washington, TikTok still has room to maneuver in the face of the "stripping bill", but it is also facing its biggest challenge since its inception.
Into the mainstream
Rick Baker, 40, lives in a rural village of just over 200 people in Montana, in the northwestern United States. He runs a metalworking workshop in his farmhouse, a cattle feed processing plant next door, with cornfields in front of him and open farmland in addition to potholes in both directions. In the spring of 2022, when he was worried about the business of his family's small workshop, his 20-year-old daughter recommended him a short video social software TikTok that she had been using for four years.
Becker's daughter took him to record a funny video and demonstrated some TikTok editing features for him. At first, Becker didn't think the platform where "just a bunch of teenage girls danced" was right for him. Becker, a self-proclaimed raunchy, joined the army after graduating from high school and was sent to the Afghan battlefield as a veteran who had been seriously wounded during his military service.
He admits that he adopted his daughter's suggestion partly because he was forced to do so. "Rural America like ours doesn't have marketing tools like billboards and stores, so I decided to give it a try. He recalled. Becker picked up his old smartphone, pointed the camera at the cutting table, and recorded himself cutting, welding, and carving the metal into a map of Montana and the American flag. He also added dynamic music to the video and posted it to his newly registered TikTok account with his own commentary.
To Becker's surprise, shortly after the video was released, many metal artists shared and liked his creation, and exchanged welding experience and their representative works with him in the comment area, followed by private messages from buyers. Over the next two weeks, he continued to update his videos, showcasing his 16 years of craftsmanship, and slowly began to focus his lens on himself, telling about his life experiences beyond metal forging and art. Three months later, the University of Montana, more than 500 kilometers away, reached out to him on TikTok with the hope of paying $10,000 to decorate the iron frame in front of the new residence hall. A year after signing up for the account, Becker now has nearly 10,000 followers, compared with less than 2,500 followers on his Facebook page, which he has been running for more than five years.
Although they are two independent products, in terms of public opinion, TikTok is often compared to the overseas version of the domestic short video platform "Douyin", both of which are related to ByteDance. In 2017, ByteDance acquired Flipagram, a short-form video app in the United States, and Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based production and sharing platform that focuses on filters and lip-sync performances. In August 2018, Musical.ly was integrated into the TikTok app, and TikTok was officially launched globally and in North America, and has since quickly gained popularity among users in the United States. As of January 2022, TikTok has reached 136 million users in the United States, ranking third among social media apps.
The absorption of adult males like Becker as TikTok loyalists is one of the important factors in TikTok's emergence as mainstream in the North American market.
On November 22, 2023, a user with more than 100,000 followers on all platforms in Lower Saxony, Germany, shoots a TikTok video in his store
Roger Chen, a professor of corporate strategy and innovation at the University of San Francisco, who came to Silicon Valley in 1995, interviewed more than a dozen TikTok executives and engineers in North America in 2022. In a 2023 business case study, he pointed out that TikTok started with lip sync and short dance videos, and has the genes of young urban women, and in 2019, the second year of TikTok's arrival in the U.S. market, the vast majority of the platform's users are middle school girls who usually don't have strong spending power, and are not necessarily attractive in the eyes of advertisers.
Chen Rongxin told this magazine that in order to cultivate more diverse users, TikTok has spent a lot of money to invite some well-known people in the fields of e-sports, history, military and science to enter the platform, and through continuous algorithm adjustment, increase the exposure of content in these fields, and find traffic passwords that attract male and older audiences through trial and error.
"Internally, there has always been a desire to expand the breadth of content, to have an older, more gender-balanced, geographically broader user ecosystem that is more of a 'mainstream' platform than a 'niche' platform. Chen Rongxin said. In reality, this "mainstreaming" transformation has been successful. According to data released by Backlinko Marketing Company, in 2023, more than four active TikTok users in the United States will become male users, more than 55% will be over 25 years old, and more than 30% will be over 35 years old.
The evolution of user groups provides the possibility to realize traffic monetization and empower small and micro enterprises. Oxford Economics, a well-known consulting firm, completed a study in 2023 in partnership with TikTok, surveying 1,050 small and medium-sized businesses and 7,500 platform users who use TikTok. The results show that TikTok can contribute more than $24.2 billion to GDP in a single year through direct and indirect co-economic benefits, and SMEs have the opportunity to create more than 220,000 jobs and $5.3 billion in tax revenue. The e-commerce economic ecology generated by TikTok has also become an indispensable part of the American social economy. The study also mentions that as of the first quarter of 2024, more than 7 million merchants of the 170 million active users in the U.S. are already using TikTok to promote.
Samantha Alario, who has been designing and making mountain outdoor swimwear for women with eco-friendly materials since 2015, is one of the 7 million small business owners. Her only brick-and-mortar store is in a mountain town of more than 70,000 people in Montana, a cold, sparsely populated area. Around the store, four or five railroads line the storefronts and open spaces in front of the rolling hills, and within a 20-minute drive there are five different river valleys and mountain lakes. "Thanks to social media, I can sell bikinis in the mountains in the winter nine months of the year. "If it weren't for TikTok, my life and family wouldn't be as stable as they are now, and I don't know where I would be." ”
Sam · Since 2015, Arario has been designing and making mountain outdoor swimsuits exclusively for women from eco-friendly materials
After entering TikTok in 2019, several swimsuit videos recorded in backyards and mountain streams posted by Arario in 2020 suddenly became popular. Users from all over the U.S. and around the world used the information embedded in the video to place orders on the store's website, and she sold thousands of swimwear throughout the year. "It's as if every video has a chance to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people who have never heard of you before and come to buy our products from the mountains. Arario said.
A domestic researcher who has long been concerned about international communication and media operations pointed out that after making the user group more diverse, TikTok relies on a powerful algorithm logic to recommend content for users based on the similarity of experience, hobbies, regions and even usage habits, tying people's attention and energy to the platform. In addition, each short video of TikTok will be exposed in the open public domain traffic pool for a certain number of users to see, and then according to data such as views, likes, and comments, the exposure of the video will be increased. Unlike traditional social media such as Facebook and Instagram, new users and vendors like Becker and Arario can get traffic from the first video post, and then insert some video store or product links to have more interaction and revenue generation.
"If I post something on Facebook and Instagram, I usually get a response after a day or two. TikTok is crazy, everything happens quickly, from the reply of a follower to the change in reality. Becker told this publication. Today, videos with the name of his own metal workshop have been viewed more than 1.6 million times on TikTok. He no longer worries about making ends meet, as the workshop's annual revenue has skyrocketed from just under a few tens of thousands of dollars to $275,000, with more than 60 percent of its customers coming from TikTok.
While empowering small businesses, many TikTok users mentioned that TikTok's online environment of encouraging everyone to create and "starting from scratch" has also made everyone more willing to show their authentic selves, and thus unite communities that have been forgotten by the big cities and middle-class elites in the United States dominated by the big cities and middle-class elites on the East and West Coasts. A veteran of the Afghan war, Becker was discharged from the army with a serious shoulder injury during his service, and when he returned to his hometown in Montana in 2004, he underwent five shoulder surgeries in eight years. With little psychological support from his friends in remote areas, apart from veterans of the local military hospital, the trauma left on the battlefield and the pain during his recovery from surgery led him to try and abuse drugs, which led him to police stations and prisons until five years ago. After suddenly becoming a local celebrity on TikTok in 2022, in addition to posting craft videos, Becker also focused more on himself, telling about what he saw on the battlefield and the fight against drugs.
"On TikTok, in addition to the big and small moments of success, I try to show the dormancy, confusion and practical difficulties of being a small business owner, because my own journey and personality are also part of the work of art. Becker said he immediately found dozens of veterans across the U.S. who had gone through similar hardships on the platform, and they immediately set up group chat groups to encourage and support each other. "We were chatting and joking over there. If anyone hasn't posted anything in a week, someone is bound to send a private message saying, 'Hey bro, are you okay?'" Beginning last year, Becker and friends began selling Montana veteran-themed hoodies around the world on TikTok, hoping to use the fundraiser to build a large metal sculpture in Montana to honor the state's residents who fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"If TikTok were to disappear one day, it would be unimaginable. Arario said.
On September 22, 2023, a sneaker buyer in Los Angeles dedicated to recording his experience of buying shoes at various shoe stores, and his number of followers on TikTok exceeded 2 million
Multi-round restrictions
But in the eyes of some American politicians and legislators, it tells the opposite story. TikTok has become a mainstream social media in the United States, and the social media ecology and influence it has created are precisely the manifestations of the spread of "Chinese power" in the United States, and it is also the reason why the United States should restrict the development of TikTok.
Beginning in 2019, discussions of restricting TikTok began to intensify in American political circles. In October of that year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer sent letters to the U.S. executive branch asking for an assessment of the risks posed by social media launched by Chinese internet companies such as TikTok in the United States. In December, the U.S. military, which used TikTok to recruit young people into the military, announced that it would ban the use of TikTok on official devices in the Army and Navy.
The military's 2019 ban kicked off an executive order at the government level to restrict TikTok's public use. As of now, the federal government and 34 of the 50 states have required the app to be disabled on public phones and communication devices.
In addition to restricting the official use of TikTok, since the Trump era, the U.S. government has tried to enact a TikTok ban that applies to ordinary people from the perspective of national security. At the time, the U.S. argued that under China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, which allows national intelligence agencies to require any organization or individual to "support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with the law," TikTok user data may be uploaded to the Chinese government through ByteDance, and app platforms are more inclined to censor content that is favorable to China. While TikTok has repeatedly said that the company would refuse any request to hand over data and that TikTok does not follow China's cybersecurity standards, that has not stopped former President Donald Trump from making a move.
In August 2020, then-President Trump issued two executive orders requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. company within 45 days, otherwise all TikTok-related business dealings would be banned in the United States. The two executive orders are too broad and not legally strict. A month later, ByteDance suspended Trump's executive order through legal proceedings in the United States. TikTok will not be removed for the time being, but TikTok needs to continue to discuss with the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is part of the U.S. State Department, the possibility of a split from ByteDance and how to deal with data security issues.
Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California, speaks at a TikTok press conference in Washington, D.C., on March 12
For ByteDance, the U.S. market is crucial. A domestic expert on American issues and cybersecurity told this magazine that TikTok currently has a total of 1 billion users in the world, and although the United States accounts for only about one-sixth of them, TikTok's American market is ByteDance's main source of income outside Chinese mainland. In Africa and Southeast Asia, for example, although the user base is larger, the individual spending power is far less than that of the United States, and American companies are advertising more on social media. The expert also mentioned that ByteDance's annual revenue in the US market exceeds $10 billion, the vast majority of which is contributed by TikTok.
TikTok is headquartered in the United States, and its management has been mostly U.S. citizens since 2022. In order to integrate into the social environment of the United States, TikTok, like other American companies, also conducts some corporate social responsibility activities that reflect public care and care for vulnerable groups. The expert told this magazine that the head of ByteDance's strategic planning team once told them that "the US market is lost, and the entire world market and international status are almost yellow."
In order to keep the U.S. market, TikTok has been trying to meet the U.S. government's requirements for data security and localization, making improvements and adjustments at the technical level. In March 2022, according to the American online media BuzzFeed, TikTok has spent a year building a data information migration and security project called "Project Texas". According to the news released by TikTok, in this $1.5 billion plan, all U.S. user data has been stored in the database of the U.S. company Oracle by default, and all algorithm training for TikTok only takes place in Oracle's database. Data Security) with offices in Nashville, Tennessee, in the southern United States.
Three overseas analysts also pointed out to this publication that TikTok is much more transparent than its American counterparts in terms of data security, management and use. Xiaomeng Lu, head of the geotechnology program at the Eurasia Group, a Washington-based political risk consultancy, has long focused on the interplay of emerging technologies, geopolitics and regulatory norms between China and the United States. She told this magazine that TikTok often holds press conferences in Washington, D.C., where she meets with experts to present their "Texas Plan" and seek further improvements.
On March 23, 2023, TikTok's CEO Shew Zi Chew testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee for the first time before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to be questioned by lawmakers from both parties on TikTok user privacy, data security, and U.S. national security. Lu Xiaomeng believes that in the more than four and a half hours of hearing, judging from the detailed and professional answers of some executives of Google, Apple, Amazon, and other companies who often come to the hearing, they are not as well prepared as Zhou Shou, who appeared for the first time.
On March 23, 2023 local time, in Washington, D.C., USA, TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi testified at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill. (Photo courtesy of Visual China)
"TikTok's various moves in the U.S. and Washington, both in terms of scale and maturity, are unprecedented for a company with a Chinese background. From the point of view of dealing with a public relations crisis, or from the point of view of a geopolitical crisis, their strategy is right," Ms. Lu said, "but they are in a disadvantaged position." Further up, they themselves can't tell. ”
Despite TikTok's multiple rounds of consultations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States since 2021, U.S. states and the federal government do not trust these compliance efforts and are only increasingly concerned about its "Chinese roots."
In this regard, TikTok has said that ByteDance is not an agent of any country, as for ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, international investors own 60% of ByteDance's shares, including large American investment companies, and in 2023, three of ByteDance's five board members are Americans.
Despite the restrictions it has faced in recent years, TikTok's popularity has continued to rise and has even begun to affect the American people's habits of getting news. According to a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center, from 2020 to 2023, the percentage of Americans who use TikTok to read news has increased from 3% to 14%, among young people aged 18 to 29, from 9% to 32%, and among Americans who regularly use social media for news, TikTok use has increased from 22% to 43% , outpacing almost all other social media apps, trailing only X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook. But in the face of turbulent U.S.-China relations, commercial and traffic success is often interpreted as the possibility of "Chinese forces" manipulating American public opinion.
In May 2023, Montana became the first state in the U.S. to legislate a total ban on TikTok. On May 16, the governor of Montana signed into law passed by the state legislature that prohibits people from downloading TikTok in the state and imposes a $10,000 per day fine on entities that provide access to TikTok services.
When I saw the news, "I was really scared". Sam Arario recalled. The 35-year-old single mother supports her two daughters by selling swimsuits and bikinis on social media, and her TikTok business is a significant part of her total income. She sent a letter of objection to the governor as she usually emailed to state legislators about environmental concerns, but received only one automated reply. Subsequently, she and a number of Montana users, along with TikTok, took the Montana state government to court and testified in October.
In November of the same year, a federal judge stopped the ban before it went into effect, ruling that it violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and finding that Montana had only targeted the appearance of the Chinese factor and had failed to protect the rights and interests of consumers in the state. "Maybe I'm just a drop in the ocean, but the efforts of our users have led to the repeal of the law. "Arario was optimistic.
But the good times didn't last long. On March 5, 2024, 19 bipartisan House members "divested bill" in the House of Representatives, blaming TikTok for its ties to the Chinese government for TikTok's digital and national security problems in the United States. On March 13, 2024 local time, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "Divestiture Bill" with 352 votes in favor and 65 votes against, which specifically named TikTok and ByteDance, aiming to require ByteDance to divest control of TikTok.
Liu Yongtao, a professor at the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, told this publication that the passage of the "stripping bill" was "lightning" and "extremely rare in the US Congress." He also explained that Biden immediately said at the time that he would sign the bill if the Senate passed the law, essentially expressing support for the "stripping bill" and his own willingness to push for legislation.
Once the bill is signed into law, ByteDance will need to divest control of TikTok within 165 days if it wants to remain on the U.S. mobile app store and web hosting platform, that is, separate TikTok's U.S. business from its Chinese parent company by selling it to U.S. businesses.
On April 17, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 360 in favor and 58 against to pass a bill that included TikTok restrictions and other sanctions. TikTok-related content retains the core of the Stripping Act, with the biggest difference being that it extends the "strip or ban" time limit to 270 days, and if the US president sees that the divestment "has made significant progress", the US president has the option to extend the time limit to 360 days.
"When the bill goes up to Capitol Hill, it shouldn't be useful who you write to. Arario said.
After being asked to "strip": there is not much room for manoeuvre
Asked if the Divestiture Act was a "TikTok ban," U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris explained that it was just an adjustment to the ownership of apps for national security purposes, not a ban. However, considering the complex political and business environment, as Zhou Shouzi said on TikTok's official video account after the House of Representatives passed the "divestment bill", the essence of the restraining order is to ban TikTok in the United States.
In 2020, China updated the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export, which listed "personalized information push service technology based on data analysis" as a prohibited technology for export. The core algorithm of TikTok developed by ByteDance is included. In other words, ByteDance's sale of TikTok's U.S. business to an American company involves exporting related technology, and it must apply for and obtain permission from the Chinese government. This is an almost impossible task at the moment.
In the face of the dilemma, TikTok is not completely in a state of restraint at the moment. With his videos and the hashtag "Defend TikTok" (#saveTikTok), Zhou hopes to mobilize a large U.S. user base and call on people to tell their TikTok stories and tell their representatives to "keep the app you love." Over the past four years, TikTok has poured more than $21 million into political lobbying.
On March 14, 2024 local time, in Washington, D.C., USA, TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi left a meeting in the office of John Fetterman, the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy of Visual China)
In addition to the huge user base and huge impact on the American social economy, TikTok is not alone in Washington and the top political and business leaders in the United States in this "defend TikTok" movement. Some of ByteDance's investors are a significant source of Republican campaign funding, and Trump, who is poised to run for president again at the end of the year, has rightly changed his stance in an election year and has begun to oppose the management of TikTok, arguing that the "stripping bill" will make Facebook, which he loaths, a winner.
Coincidentally, according to Bloomberg News, tech companies, platform companies and industry associations representing TikTok, including Microsoft, Apple and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, TikTok's main rival, are also opposing the hasty passage of the "divestiture" of the relevant bill.
Lu Xiaomeng pointed out that with the recovery of the European and American economies, more and more Chinese companies are increasing their investment in advertising on overseas platforms. For example, in the past three years, Chinese companies have seen an increase in advertising investment on Facebook and Google, accounting for 8%~10% of their respective global advertising revenue. Therefore, interest groups representing these platform companies in the United States will be wary of the loss of corporate earnings from China's counter-creation of American companies. In addition, governments including Australia, Canada, and the European Union have been trying to regulate, raise taxes, and impose fines on U.S. technology companies on issues such as privacy, monopoly, unfair competition, and data security. "These U.S. companies don't like this [divestiture] bill because it's so arbitrary," Ms. Lu said, "and they wonder if the U.S. government can treat Chinese companies in this way, in addition to the Chinese government's countermeasures against American companies, can the EU government also use more force to suppress American companies?"
At present, TikTok's existence in the United States will not be affected by the restraining order in the short term, and the content of a series of military bills involving TikTok is also suspected of violating the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. TikTok can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying that the regulations that could lead to its "divestiture" and "delisting" are unconstitutional.
But TikTok still faces unprecedented challenges. Lu Xiaomeng mentioned that the "First Amendment loopholes" of the bills handled by senators will be smaller, and members of the Senate and House of Representatives will be able to endorse the bill in a coordinated manner. Today, appeals are much more difficult and costly than they would have been able to cope with in the past. In the face of the dilemma of "stripping or banning", TikTok is likely to face long-term development restrictions in the United States, or even fall into the situation of eventually withdrawing from the American market.
U.S. Democratic Senator Mark Warner introduces the "Limiting the Emergence of Information and Communications Technology Security Threats" bill at a press conference at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 7, 2023
In Montana, more than 3,000 kilometers west of Washington, Rick Becker has begun downloading and uploading TikTok videos to Instagram, albeit reluctantly, and has begun posting more content on Instagram's Reels, modeled after TikTok's launch. He doesn't understand why, in a country where freedom is emphasized, the government can tell citizens how we can communicate and promote our business, what we can and can't put in our phones.
What Becker cherishes most is the social network built on TikTok. "The business may be replicated on other platforms, but it shouldn't be easy for me to replicate the brotherhood I've gained in the metal craftsman and veteran community through TikTok, as well as my physical and mental health and sense of belonging. He said. He also hopes that the fundraising efforts for the Montana Veterans Memorial will be completed before possible surprises strike.