This week, Barack Obama took to TikTok to meet young voters where they’re at. The former president appeared on the accounts of creators including Carlos Espina, a twenty-five-year-old activist who has over ten million followers, to encourage eligible voters to register. According to Axios, the appearance was part of a broader Democratic strategy aimed at winning over swing voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine. More broadly, by setting up accounts on TikTok and using popular creators as modern-day broadcasters, the Democrats hope to transmit their message to places that traditional media may not reach. Kamala Harris, who joined TikTok just a few days after Joe Biden dropped out of the race, capitalized on memes that had recently swept the video platform—viral moments relating to coconuts and “brat summer”—as Mathew Ingram wrote in this newsletter at the time. “Thought it was about time to join,” Harris said in her first video. Similar efforts, but on a smaller scale, have been made on the right: Trump created his TikTok account in June, described it as “an honor” to join, and gained over a million followers overnight.
This embrace of TikTok has not been all-encompassing, however. In April, President Biden signed a bipartisan bill that would ban the app in the country unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divests from the US. (The bill is popularly known as “the TikTok ban,” though one Republican lawmaker described it not as a ban but “a forced separation.” ByteDance has stated that divestiture is “not possible technologically, commercially, or legally,” especially given the bill’s short deadline.) If the bill goes into effect, Apple and Google will be legally required to remove TikTok from their app stores, and conducting business with TikTok will become a federal crime. This has resulted in an awkward contradiction: high-ranking politicians are using TikTok for their own political momentum while supporting a bill that could kill it shortly after the election. (Cameron Joseph wrote about this dynamic for CJR earlier in the year.)
On Monday, TikTok and the Department of Justice faced off in a DC courtroom to determine the constitutionality of the bill. Some observers called it the most important two hours in the app’s history. The hearing took place before three judges who appeared unconvinced by TikTok’s arguments that the bill is, in fact, unconstitutional. The government’s case centers on two primary concerns: first, TikTok holds vast amounts of data on Americans, which the Chinese government could access and use to undermine US security; second, the app’s algorithm could be manipulated by the Chinese government to control the content that American users see “for malign purposes.”
Lawyers for TikTok argued that the US arm of the company is an American entity with First Amendment rights. If the bill goes into effect, they say, it would suppress the speech of the hundred and seventy million Americans who use the app to share and engage with ideas, including political discourse. TikTok also argued that the law should be subject to “strict scrutiny,” meaning that the government must demonstrate that it poses an immediate threat. According to a summary in Tech Policy Press, TikTok’s lawyers argue that the government cannot meet this standard, since its case is based on “the possibility of future Chinese control” rather than any named current threat.
In documents filed before the hearing, the Justice Department stated that the bill is aimed at addressing national security concerns unique to TikTok’s connection to China, “not at any suppression of protected speech.” It also says that there is no direct evidence of China using TikTok for propaganda purposes but that there are significant risks that it might. It is difficult to discern exactly what the DOJ’s claims are based on, however, as the documents are heavily redacted due to national security concerns. Even TikTok’s lawyers were not permitted to see the classified information. This became the basis of another argument in court: that the government’s case is not fully disclosed, lacks direct evidence, and is mainly speculative.
Lawyers representing a group of TikTok creators also attended the hearing. The creators have argued that a ban could hurt their livelihoods and that alternative platforms like Instagram lack “TikTok’s novel way of hosting, curating and disseminating speech,” according to the New York Times. (The law firm representing the TikTok creators, Davis Wright Tremaine, challenged a TikTok ban in the state of Montana last year, and prevailed in getting the law temporarily halted.) Both TikTok and the Justice Department have asked the court to make a decision by December 6, giving the US Supreme Court enough time to consider an appeal before the national bill takes effect.
Opponents of the TikTok ban say that it mirrors crackdowns seen under some autocratic regimes. According to Jameel Jaffer, at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, the ban is “an unwelcome throwback to an era in which the government exercised far-reaching control over Americans’ access to information and ideas from abroad.” Other critics have poked at the government’s argument that TikTok is not a US company: “Why would TikTok, with seven thousand employees in the United States and a headquarters in Los Angeles and New York, not be considered an American company?” V Spehar, a journalist and popular TikTok creator, said. “I think that’s not necessarily fair.”
According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, support for the TikTok ban has been thinning among the US population: the share of people who support it now stands at 32 percent, down from 50 percent in March 2023. TikTok has used this relative popularity among US users to push back against lawmakers. Earlier this year, the platform introduced a pop-up message urging users to contact their local representatives and voice their opposition. Soon after, lawmakers’ offices were reportedly flooded with thousands of phone calls. But at least one lawmaker—Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat—did not interpret this as a sign to abandon the bill. Instead, he argued that it showed how China could influence the behavior of Americans if it chose to do so.
The result of the presidential election in November may save or sink TikTok in the US. Trump is now voicing support for the app—despite previous attempts to ban it. “I’m for TikTok, because you need competition,” he said, during an interview with Bloomberg. “If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram—and that’s, you know, that’s Zuckerberg.” In a video, Trump promised to save the platform if elected president. (As Ingram reported earlier this year, some observers speculated that Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Yass, a financier whose firm has invested in ByteDance, may have aided his change of heart.)
Harris hasn’t directly weighed in on the TikTok ban since it was enacted, according to Forbes. During an interview with ABC in March, she said that the administration has “national security concerns” about TikTok’s owner but that it has “no intention to ban TikTok.” When asked whether what was then the Biden-Harris campaign would stay on TikTok should the ban go into effect, Harris responded: “Well, we’ll address that when we come to it.”
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Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Camille Bromley examined J.D. Vance’s relationship with the media. He has hurled insults at the press, and yet “talking to reporters has become routine for Vance, and he’s devoted much of his public life to speaking to outlets from across the political spectrum,” Bromley writes. “Journalists who have profiled him or covered him on Capitol Hill told me that he’s generally a thoughtful and interesting person to engage with, more so than many politicians. He’s someone who enjoys debating ideas and policy. Sitting down for interviews in person, he can be genial and forthcoming, joking around.” Vance, Bromley concludes, is weird in some ways, but in other ways is not that weird at all; he is, perhaps above all, “just a pundit who knows how to keep the calls coming.”
- Also for CJR, Jake Lahut spoke with reporters in Ohio who have been at the center of a media storm since Vance and Trump amplified the lie that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield are eating pets. In related news, the Wall Street Journal reports that Vance persisted in pushing the pets lie even after the city manager told his aide that it wasn’t true—and that a missing cat that the Vance campaign reported to the Journal was found safe and well. CNN’s Hadas Gold checked in with staffers at the Haitian Times, who have faced threats since the Springfield story blew up. And, after Vance attacked The Atlantic’s David Frum on X, Frum observed that this “is not the behavior of a winning campaign.”
- Also for The Atlantic, Tom Nichols criticized Scientific American’s decision to endorse Harris—only the second such endorsement the magazine has ever issued. (It previously backed Biden in 2020.) “I understand the frustration that probably led to this decision,” Nichols writes. And yet, “strange as it seems to say it, a magazine devoted to science should not take sides in a political contest.” Nichols argues that Scientific American’s readers already know all they need to know about Trump, that the endorsement risks reducing Trump voters’ trust in science, and that the language of the endorsement was “highly politicized.”
- Yesterday, Adrian Wojnarowski, the famously scoopy ESPN basketball reporter, shocked the sports world by announcing that he is quitting journalism and taking a job as general manager of the men’s basketball team at St. Bonaventure University, his alma mater. Wojnarowski’s change of lane “is an acknowledgment of the grueling lifestyle of a news-breaker and the world he built,” the Washington Post’s Ben Strauss writes. Other NBA reporters immediately “began whispering about how the league’s information ecosystem could change.”
- And for CJR’s podcast The Kicker, Josh Hersh sat down with Jina Moore Ngarambe, the former editor of Guernica, who resigned earlier this year after members of the magazine’s volunteer staff rebelled against an essay centering the internal moral calculus of a British Israeli writer. (Guernica’s publisher eventually took the piece down.) “In an environment where everyone thinks of story space as scarcity, it can entrench the binary nature of” conversations, Moore Ngarambe said. “The media is kind of a binary space in general. We have good guys or bad guys. Part of complexity is thinking in a way that isn’t binary.”
New from CJR: How J.D. Vance keeps the press calls coming.
Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen is a computational investigative fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. She works on a range of computational projects on the digital media landscape, including influence operations conducted through news media and the information ecosystem. She graduated from Columbia University in 2022 with an MS degree in data journalism.