Did the TikTok ban go too far?
There may be no smoking gun yet, says law Professor Alan Rozenshtein about the potential national security threat posed by the social media app TikTok, “but the gun is assembled, it’s loaded, it’s on the table, and it’s pointed. You’re much closer to this nightmare scenario than you might expect.”
Rozenshtein, who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, spoke at a Harvard Law School event Monday with Anupam Chander, Georgetown Law professor. The two debated the U.S. law requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent, to sell the app to a U.S. firm or face a nationwide ban, and the 75-day extension granted ByteDance by President Trump, which will run out on April 5.
Rozenshtein felt it was far from perfect but generally supported the law Congress passed last year, noting that TikTok, which specializes in playing personalized series of short videos, could harvest a huge amount of information on its 170 million American users for counterintelligence purposes. And the Chinese government, through ByteDance, could pressure TikTok, which is algorithmically driven, to modify its algorithms in ways that would be adverse to America’s interests, he added.
“Imagine that the United States and China get into a shooting war over Taiwan,” said Rozenshtein. “Suddenly the concern would be that TikTok would be flooded with pro-Chinese, anti-Taiwan and anti-American content. Given that TikTok is not only very popular, but for young Americans, it is increasingly the main source of news, that’s very concerning.”
On the other side of the debate, Chander criticized the TikTok law because of its speculative nature and potential First Amendment violations. In its suit against the law, TikTok claimed it violated the First Amendment’s speech protections. The Supreme Court rebuked TikTok’s claims in a ruling on Jan. 17, two days before the ban was to go into effect.
“In Professor Rozenshtein’s description, the problem was all speculative,” said Chander. “It was the possibility that we might get into a shooting war. They might then use the app to manipulate us in favor of China, neglecting our sense of patriotism, undermining democracy, etc., or they might convince us that Taiwan is really Chinese and therefore should properly belong to China, which are the kinds of highly speculative things that First Amendment law typically has not tolerated.”
Chander and Rozenshtein pondered the possibility of another extension to give TikTok more time to find a way to comply with the law.
Chander said Trump could use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a federal law that allows the president to regulate international commerce during a national emergency triggered by a foreign threat.
“If I were in the White House Counsel’s Office, I would use IEEPA,” said Chander. “I would say, ‘You have to keep the lights on TikTok because otherwise people will move to RedNote.’”
RedNote, another Chinese social media platform, saw an increase of American users in the wake of the TikTok ban. According to experts, RedNote could pose more security risks than TikTok because RedNote stores its data in Chinese servers, unlike TikTok, which stores American users’ data in Texas. And RedNote gets closer scrutiny from the Chinese government, being subject to censorship efforts — TikTok says it is not.
The two social-media apps, however, are not alike. TikTok specializes in entertainment and instructional video and viral cultural trends, and RedNote, which started as a shopping platform, focuses on user tips on travel, makeup, fashion, and shopping.
Asked about the possibility of a one-year extension, Rozenshtein expressed concerns about the overreach of executive power. “If we have learned anything, it is that the one-way ratchet of executive power and the ability to rewrite laws has some serious downsides,” he said.
Both Chander and Rozenshtein agreed that the U.S. government should have addressed national security concerns over TikTok a while ago and not after it became widely popular. They shared concerns about the quick way Congress approved the TikTok law after several years of inactivity.
“The Biden administration had the power to require divestiture of TikTok since it came to office,” said Chander. “It stopped negotiating the mitigation arrangement with TikTok in August 2022. The administration had that power for years and sat on it.”
Chander said that the TikTok bill was motivated by concerns over espionage and propaganda, but citing the words of former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who co-sponsored the bill, said “the greater concern was about the propaganda threat.”
As for the bill’s approval, Chander cited comments by Gallagher, who said that the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, followed by the proliferation of pro-Palestinian views and antisemitic content on the platform, helped the bill pass with bipartisan support in March 2024.
For Rozenshtein, even if critics argue there is no evidence of TikTok’s content manipulation, the threat is real. Even if the law has flaws, it was the best thing that the U.S. could do, he said.