Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed a sweeping bill imposing a minimum age limit for social media usage, in the latest example of states taking more aggressive steps intended to protect teens online.
But even as Sanders signed the bill into law on Wednesday afternoon, the legislation appeared to contain vast loopholes and exemptions benefiting companies that lobbied on the bill and raising questions about how much of the industry it truly covers.
The legislation, known as the Social Media Safety Act and taking effect in September, is aimed at giving parents more control over their kids’ social media usage, according to lawmakers. It defines social media companies as any online forum that lets users create public profiles and interact with each other through digital content.
It requires companies that operate those services to verify the ages of all new users and, if the users are under 18 years old, to obtain a parent’s consent before allowing them to create an account. To perform the age checks, the law relies on third-party companies to verify users’ personal information, such as a driver’s license or photo ID.
“While social media can be a great tool and a wonderful resource, it can have a massive negative impact on our kids,” Sanders said at a press conference before signing the bill.
Utah finalized a similar law last month, raising concerns among some users and advocacy groups that the legislation could make user data less secure, internet access less private and infringe upon younger users’ basic rights.
The push by states to legislate on social media comes after years of mounting scrutiny of the industry and claims that it has harmed users’ well-being and mental health, particularly among teens.
Despite its seemingly universal scope, however, the new law, also known as SB396, includes numerous carveouts for certain types of digital services and, in some cases, individual companies. And although its sponsors have said the law is specifically meant to apply to certain platforms, including TikTok, parts of the legislative language appear to result in the exact opposite effect.
In the final days of negotiation over the bill, Arkansas lawmakers approved an amendment that created several categorical exemptions from the age verification requirements. Media companies that “exclusively” offer subscription content; social media platforms that permit users to “generate short video clips of dancing, voice overs, or other acts of entertainment”; and companies that “exclusively offer” video gaming-focused social networking features were exempted.
Another amendment carved out companies that sell cloud storage services, business cybersecurity services or educational technology and that simultaneously derive less than 25% of their total revenue from running a social media platform.
Sen. Tyler Dees, a lead co-sponsor of the legislation, explained in remarks on the Arkansas senate floor on April 6 that the exemptions and tweaks to the bill, some of which he said were made in consultation with Apple, Meta and Google, were intended to shield non-social media services from the bill’s age requirements and to focus attention on new accounts created by children, not existing adult accounts.
“There’s other services that Google offers … like cloud storage, et cetera,” Dees said. “So that’s really the intent of carving out — like LinkedIn, that is a social – I’m sorry, that is a business networking site, and so that’s the intent of those bills.”
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is apparently exempt from SB396 under a provision that carves out companies that provide “career development opportunities, including professional networking, job skills, learning certifications, and job posting and application services.”
Other lawmakers have questioned whether the legislation — which has now become law — exempts a giant of the social media industry: YouTube, whose auto-play features and algorithmic recommendation engine have been accused of promoting extremism and radicalizing viewers.
The confusion over YouTube appears to stem from the carveout for businesses that offer cloud storage and that make less than 25% of their revenue from social media.
What is unclear is whether YouTube is subject to SB396 because it is a distinct company within Google whose revenue comes almost entirely from operating a social media platform, or whether it is not covered because YouTube is a part of Google and Google is exempt because it derives only a small share of its revenues from YouTube.
In response to questions by CNN, Dees said SB396 targets platforms including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, but omitted any mention of Google and declined to answer whether YouTube specifically would be covered by the law.
“The purpose of this bill was to empower parents and protect kids from social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat,” Dees said in a statement. “We worked with stakeholders to ensure that email, text messaging, video streaming, and networking websites were not covered by the bill.”
In remarks at Wednesday’s bill signing, Sanders told reporters that Google and Amazon are exempted from the law, implying that YouTube will not be subject to the age verification requirements imposed on other major social media sites.
Meanwhile, Dees’ statement appeared to contradict the language in SB396 that purports to exempt any company that “allows a user to generate short video clips of dancing, voice overs, or other acts of entertainment in which the primary purpose is not educational or informative” — content that can be commonly found on TikTok, Snapchat and the other social media platforms Deese named.
According to Meta spokesperson, “We want teens to be safe online. We’ve developed more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including tools that let parents and teens work together to limit the amount of time teens spend on Instagram, and age-verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences.”
Meta “automatically set teens’ accounts to private when they join Instagram, we’ve further restricted the options advertisers have to reach teens, as well as the information we use to show ads to teens… and we don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders,” according to the spokesperson, who added: “We’ll continue to work closely with experts, policymakers and parents on these important issues.”
Spokespeople for Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A high-profile lawsuit brought by TikTok users and creators last month challenging Montana’s statewide ban against the short-form video app is being funded by the social media giant itself, the company told CNN on Wednesday.
TikTok has been covering legal fees for the group of five TikTok creators, said Jodi Seth, a TikTok spokesperson, separately from the company’s own lawsuit to block the state’s new law targeting the app over national security concerns.
“We support our creators through various programs and have an ongoing dialogue about their presence on TikTok,” Seth said in a statement. “Throughout this process, many creators have expressed major concerns both privately and publicly about the potential impact of the Montana law on their livelihoods. We will support our creators in fighting for their constitutional rights.”
TikTok’s involvement in the creators’ suit was first reported this week by The New York Times, weeks after the initial court case was filed. The company’s role in the litigation had not been previously known.
The suit by the TikTok creators was the first to challenge Montana’s law banning TikTok from being offered within state lines and establishing penalties for the company and for app stores that violate the law. Legal experts have said the legislation, which is not set to take effect until January, raises constitutional issues and may well be practically unenforceable even if the law is upheld.
Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.
Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.
“You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.
That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”
Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”
There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.
But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.
“We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”
But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.
The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.
At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.
In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.
As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.
In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)
While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.
“That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”
The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.
California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.
“Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.
Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.
“This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”
But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.
“A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”
In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”
Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.
For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.
Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.
“TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”
Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.
Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.
John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.
More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.
“National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”
Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.
“We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.
But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.
Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.
“It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.
Montana has become the first US state to ban TikTok on all devices, even personal ones, triggering renewed doubts about the short-form video app’s future in the country.
On Wednesday, the state’s governor, Greg Gianforte, signed a bill into law that would fine TikTok and online app stores for making the service available to state residents. It takes effect next year.
The move goes a step beyond other states that have restricted TikTok from government devices. It also comes at a time when some federal lawmakers are pushing for a nationwide ban.
But legal and technology experts say there are huge hurdles for Montana, or any state, to enforce such a law. The TikTok ban immediately prompted one lawsuit from TikTok users who allege it violates their First Amendment rights, with more legal challenges expected. Even if the law is allowed to stand, the practicalities of the internet may make it impossible to keep TikTok out of the hands of users.
Montana’s new law, SB419, makes it illegal for TikTok and app marketplaces to offer the TikTok service within state lines.
Passed in April, the bill establishes fines of $10,000 per violation per day, where a single violation is defined as “each time that a user accesses TikTok, is offered the ability to access TikTok, or is offered the ability to download TikTok.”
Individual users themselves would not be on the hook just for accessing TikTok, according to the law.
If the law survives in the courts, TikTok, and companies such as Apple and Google, could be forced to find ways to restrict TikTok from Montana smartphone users — or face huge penalties.
But that’s a big if.
TikTok and other civil society groups warn that the law as written is unconstitutional. There are two main arguments TikTok’s defenders have cited.
One is that the law violates the First Amendment rights of Montanans, by restricting their ability to access legal speech and by infringing on their own rights to free expression through the app.
On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union accused Gianforte and the state legislature of having “trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information, and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment.”
A group of TikTok users echoed that complaint in a lawsuit filed Wednesday evening in the US District Court for the District of Montana, hours after the governor’s signature. “Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” according to the complaint.
Another allegation is that the law represents an unconstitutional “bill of attainder,” or a law that penalizes somebody absent due process.
NetChoice, an industry trade group that counts TikTok as a member, said the bill “ignores the U.S. Constitution.”
“The government may not block our ability to access constitutionally protected speech – whether it is in a newspaper, on a website or via an app,” said Carl Szabo, NetChoice’s general counsel.
A spokesperson for Gianforte didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Even if the law survives a legal challenge, experts say its breadth could make it difficult to effectively implement and enforce.
For one thing, app stores such as Apple’s operate on a country-by-country basis and aren’t able to filter apps at the state level, multiple experts have said.
As a result, there would be no way for companies such as Apple and Google to practically comply with the law, TechNet, a trade organization that counts those companies as members, told Montana lawmakers at a hearing in March.
“App stores,” a TechNet witness said at the hearing, “do not have the ability to geofence on a state-by-state basis. It would thus be impossible for our members to prevent the app from being downloaded specifically in the state of Montana.”
The open-ended nature of the law means enormous unbounded liabilities for TikTok and app store operators.
“What this really does is create a huge potential liability for both TikTok and the mobile app stores,” said Nicholas Garcia, policy counsel at the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. “And what it requires them to do is to figure it out, under threat of Montana coming in and saying, ‘You have not been complying with the law.’”
One sure-fire way would be for Montana officials to attempt to download or access TikTok themselves on devices they control, and if they are successful, to sue TikTok or app store companies for those violations, said Alan Rozenshtein, an associate law professor at the University of Minnesota. But that would not identify violations occurring on devices used by the wider public, which is the entire point of the ban, he added.
“That would require Montana to do surveillance of its own citizens of who’s downloading, and how,” Rozenshtein said. Alternatively, he added, Montana could try to obtain court orders compelling the companies to hand over business information — such as billing data or other non-content information related to users — that could identify them as Montana residents.
Authorities could also try to subpoena TikTok or the app stores for information on users who have accessed or downloaded TikTok from within the state, but those requests wouldn’t capture the many people who would likely circumvent the ban using more sophisticated methods.
Virtual private networking (VPN) services would make it trivial for users to get around the restrictions, according to Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a consumer advocacy group. A VPN could make a user in Montana appear as if they are connected to the internet from outside state lines.
“Any teenage anime fan or British TV aficionado can tell you how to circumvent such a silly ban using a VPN,” said Greer.
Officials could potentially try to expand their dragnet by asking companies to use additional data they possess on their users to make inferences about who may be accessing TikTok. But depending on the scope of such a request, it could trigger legal objections and privacy concerns — if the additional data is even available.
Asking internet providers to implement statewide network filters might be another way to enforce the law, said Garcia. But internet providers are not named as a type of entity subject to the TikTok ban.
“So the only reason they would get involved would be if TikTok or Apple and Google wanted them to,” Garcia said, “and made some business case for why they should go through that effort on a contractual basis or something.”
Still, said Rozenshtein, just because the Montana law is silent on internet providers does not preclude Montana from potentially seeking a court order forcing broadband companies to filter TikTok traffic at the network level.
As with the dozens of other states that have imposed some level of TikTok restrictions, Montana’s government has cited the app as a potential privacy and security risk.
US officials worry that TikTok’s links to China through its parent company, ByteDance, might result in American’s personal information leaking to the Chinese government. That could help China with spying or disinformation campaigns against the United States, according to authorities.
So far, though, the risk appears to be hypothetical: There is no public evidence to suggest that the Chinese government has actually accessed TikTok’s US user data. And TikTok isn’t the only company that collects large amounts of data, or that might be an attractive target for Chinese espionage.
TikTok has said it is executing on a plan to store US user data on cloud servers owned by the US tech giant Oracle, and that when the initiative is complete, access to the data will be overseen by US employees.
More than half of US states have announced some restrictions on TikTok affecting the app on government devices. Montana’s ban marks the beginning of a new phase, however — and the widely expected legal challenges may determine whether other states soon follow suit.
Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington said Sunday that TikTok represents “an immediate threat” from China and called for the short-form video app to be banned in the US.
The chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Congress should pass a data privacy law and ban TikTok in the US after the company’s CEO Shou Chew testified in front of her committee on Thursday.
McMorris Rodgers said Chew’s testimony “made clear” that TikTok is a threat to the US.
“What the hearing made clear to me was that TikTok should be banned in the United States of America to address the immediate threat and we also need a national data privacy law,” McMorris Rodgers told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
While many nations have imposed bans on official government devices out of national security concerns, there is currently no public evidence the Chinese government has spied on people through TikTok.
The company told CNN in a statement, “The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent US-based protection of US user data and systems with robust third-party monitoring, vetting and verification, which we are already implementing.”
On Sunday, McMorris Rodgers responded to criticism from TikTok users, many of whom mocked lawmakers for their lack of familiarity with the app and questioned why Congress would spend time regulating social media. She noted the rare bipartisan agreement on the national security risks the app presents.
“I would say there is an immediate threat via TikTok from the Chinese Communist Party. That is the reason that I believe we need to ban TikTok immediately. It is a national security threat,” McMorris Rodgers said. “It united Republicans and Democrats on the committee as to the urgent need for us to take action.”
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, also shared concerns over the app’s connection to China on Sunday.
“At the end of the day, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, and by Chinese law, that company has to be willing to turn over data to the Communist Party or, one of my bigger fears, we have 150 million Americans on TikTok, average of about 90 minutes a day, and how that channel could be used for propaganda purposes or disinformation by the Communist Party,” Warner said in an interview with CBS News.
McMorris Rodgers also emphasized the need to pass a national data privacy law to restrict all social media platforms from collecting user data, including those based in the US.
“We need to take action whether it’s TikTok, big tech or other data brokers to restrict the amount of data that they’re collecting to begin with,” she said.
This story has been updated with additional information.
TikTok is about to lose a key safety executive as the app faces growing pressure from lawmakers and threats of a ban in the United States.
TikTok’s Head of US Data Security Trust and Safety Eric Han is set to leave the company next week. His departure was confirmed to CNN by TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan. The news was first reported Tuesday by The Verge.
In the role, which he has held since 2019, Han led policy decisions such as those aimed at reducing the spread of dangerous challenges and cracking down on paid political posts by influencers. The position will be temporarily filled by Andy Bonillo, TikTok’s interim general manager of US data security, until a permanent replacement is found, Shanahan said.
With the move, TikTok will lose a key safety leader at a difficult moment for the platform. US lawmakers in recent months have ramped up calls for a nationwide ban of the app over concerns that its parent company ByteDance’s connections to China could pose a national security risk to the United States.
TikTok confirmed in March that federal officials have demanded that the app’s Chinese owners sell their stake in the social media platform, or risk facing a US ban of the app. And last month, Montana lawmakers approved legislation to ban TikTok on personal devices, which would make it the first state to do so, assuming the bill is signed by the state’s governor.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew testified before Congress in March and attempted to reassure lawmakers about the safety of the app and the security of US users’ data.
TikTok did not respond to a question about the reason for Han’s departure.
TikTok on Monday filed a suit against Montana over a bill that would ban the popular short-form video app in the state starting early next year.
TikTok alleges that the ban violates the US Constitution, including the First Amendment, as well as other federal laws, according to a complaint filed in Montana District Court. The company also claims concerns that the Chinese government could access the data of US TikTok users – which are a key motivation behind the ban – are “unfounded.”
The bill was signed by Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte last week, and would impose a fine of $10,000 per day on TikTok or app stores for making the app available to personal devices in the state starting on January 1, 2024.
“We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said in a statement. “We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts.”
Emily Flower, a spokesperson for Montana’s Attorney General, told CNN: “We expected a legal challenge and are fully prepared to defend the law.”
The Montana law stems from growing criticism of TikTok over its ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. Many US officials have expressed fears that the Chinese government could potentially access US data via TikTok for spying purposes, though there is no evidence that the Chinese government has ever done so. Some federal lawmakers have also called for a ban.
Montana’s ban went a step beyond other states that have restricted TikTok from government devices. But legal and technology experts say there are challenges for Montana, or any state, to enforce such a ban. Even if the law is allowed to stand, the practicalities of the internet may make it impossible to keep TikTok out of the hands of users.
TikTok said in the complaint that the app is used by “hundreds of thousands” of people in Montana to “communicate with each other and others around the world on an endless variety of topics, from business to politics to the arts.”
“This unprecedented and extreme step of banning a major platform for First Amendment speech, based on unfounded speculation about potential foreign government access to user data and the content of the speech, is flatly inconsistent with the constitution,” TikTok said in the complaint.
TikTok is seeking for the court to invalidate and permanently enjoin Montana from enforcing the ban.
The legal challenge by TikTok is an indicator of the hurdles that Montana and other lawmakers could face in attempting to restrict the platform in the United States. A group of TikTok creators also sued Montana last week over the state’s ban, saying it violates their First Amendment rights.
In the days after TikTok’s CEO was grilled by Congress for the first time, many TikTok users began posting about an alternative platform called Lemon8, sometimes with eerily similar language.
Multiple creators described the app as being like “if Pinterest and Instagram had a baby, with TikTok’s algorithm.” Some compared it to TikTok circa 2020 and encouraged other influencers to join the app before it grows. They also asked followers to share their Lemon8 usernames in the comments.
As it turned out, the app wasn’t just a random alternative to TikTok. Lemon8 is a social media platform launched in the United States earlier this year by TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance amid federal and state efforts to ban or restrict TikTok in the country over national security concerns.
The similarities in the videos comparing the new service to Instagram and Pinterest, which were posted by both English and Spanish-speaking creators, raised questions about whether people were being paid to promote the new app on TikTok. But despite that speculation — and the mounting scrutiny on TikTok and ByteDance — a growing number of US users and influencers are now eagerly touting Lemon8, with its focus on photos and highly curated, informational or “aspirational” content.
“We have to talk about TikTok’s new sister app,” a creator said in one such video.
“I’ve seen a lot of bigger content creators that I love on it and promoting it on their Instagram stories, so I thought, ‘okay, it’s my time to hop on this bandwagon,’” said Melanie Cruz, who got her start creating content as a YouTube vlogger in high school around 2018. “I like that it’s something simple, it’s nothing too in your face … it’s not overwhelming.”
Lemon8 has been downloaded just over one million times in the United States since it became available on US app stores in February, and had around half a million daily active US users last month, according to intelligence platform Apptopia.
The early traction for Lemon8 hints at the whack-a-mole challenge lawmakers could face in reining in TikTok and other social media platforms. It also carries some hints of TikTok’s own rise, which was reportedly fueled in part by ByteDance spending heavily to advertise the service on rival platforms Facebook and Snapchat. This time, however, the best place to promote the next TikTok may be on TikTok itself.
The New York Times reported last month that ByteDance had begun early marketing efforts for Lemon8 that included working with influencers. Now, some creators featured on Lemon8’s “for you” feed appear to be disclosing their work with the company using the hashtag #Lemon8Partner in their captions.
A ByteDance company source said that Lemon8 is still in its early days and testing how to work with creators. They said ByteDance has not launched any formal marketing efforts for Lemon8, but in some cases has made deals to pay creators to post on the platform. However, they denied rumors that ByteDance had paid creators to promote the new app on TikTok.
ByteDance has also recently listed open jobs for Lemon8 creator partnerships roles, according to postings viewed by CNN. “Lemon8 is a social media platform committed to building a diverse and inclusive community where people can discover new content and creators every day,” the job postings read.
Lemon8’s photo-heavy focus marks a stark shift away from most of the major social apps that, following TikTok’s lead, have gone all-in on endlessly scrollable short-form videos in recent years.
Lemon8’s homepage is a “for you” feed where users can scroll through content, similar to TikTok, but instead of videos, the feed is two columns of still images. When you click through to a post, it might be a single photo or a carousel of images. It’s also possible to post videos on the app, but they’re less popular.
The app is heavily centered on beauty and lifestyle content — the “for you” page can be sorted into six categories including fashion, home and travel. Many of the posts feature lengthy captions, and users can also edit images to include text overlays. On top of similarities to Instagram and Pinterest, Lemon8 looks nearly identical to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu.
Still, the app lacks some standard social platform features such as messaging and the option to tag other users in posts.
A recent scroll through Lemon8’s “for you” page showed before-and-after photos of a botox treatment, a “no restrictions” day-long eating plan, book recommendations, black tie wedding attire tips and “10 recent girly Amazon buys I do NOT regret.”
“It seems like people love it or hate it,” Madison Bravenec, a health coach and content creator, said of the app’s focus on aesthetics. But she added that the app’s targeted focus on certain types of content has made it easier to find a community that’s interested in the wellness content she likes to create, whereas the most popular posts on TikTok often have to appeal to a wider audience.
Some creators say Lemon8 is filling a hole in the social media ecosystem that was left when Instagram moved to prioritize short-form video content in order to better compete with TikTok, frustrating many creators who joined the app for its original focus on photos.
“We’re not videographers, we’re not the types of people who would like to change the ways we create content and communicate with others just because a platform is prioritizing one deliverable over the other,” said Can Ahtam, a professional photographer who joined Instagram more than a decade ago. “So all of us did feel the impact of reach being lower with the photos we were sharing [on Instagram].”
Ahtam added: “If we were to compare them side-by-side right now, Lemon8 would have the upper hand in photos being shared.”
Lemon8’s userbase remains a far cry from the 150 million users TikTok says it has in the United States.
Still, in videos reviewing Lemon8, some creators have pondered whether the app could ultimately function as a replacement if TikTok were to get banned in the United States, preserving the content recommendation algorithm that helped make TikTok one of the country’s most popular apps and launched the careers of countless influencers.
But if TikTok were to go down, Lemon8 would likely go with it, according to James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The concern is still the same, which is that ByteDance is a Chinese company subject to Chinese law,” Lewis said. “If it collects [users’ personal] information, then you’ve got the same problem.”
TikTok, for its part, has said that its app does not pose a risk to US users, and that the Chinese government has never asked for US user data.
The practical ramifications for creators of a TikTok (and, perhaps by extension, Lemon8) ban — if one were enacted — would still likely be months away, if not more. Lewis said he doesn’t expect any nationwide legislation to be passed before the end of this year, and it would almost certainly face legal challenges that could drag out its implementation if it did.
By launching a new app even with TikTok in the spotlight, “ByteDance clearly doesn’t feel like they’re at risk,” Lewis said. And many creators say they’re not necessarily worried either.
Even if TikTok and Lemon8 were banned, Cruz said, “I already have a following on all the other platforms.”
On the eve of a high-profile TikTok hearing this week, the company shared that it now has more than 150 million US monthly active users. But after the heated, hours-long hearing, filled with lawmakers telling TikTok’s CEO the app should be banned, some may now be wondering where all those users will go next if the social network disappears.
The answer: probably other big American tech platforms.
Many of the largestUSsocial media companies have spent years copying TikTok’s features, which would make a shift away from the platform easier for its creators and users. Instagram, for example, introduced its own short-form video tool in 2020 called Reels.Snapchat has Spotlight, YouTube has Shorts and even Spotify has a TikTok-like video feed with recommended music and other content.
“Obviously, if a ban is approved and enforced, the content, user count and engagement, and likely ad dollars for Snap, Instagram, and YouTube will increase,” said Ali Mogharabi, an analyst at financial services firm Morningstar, in a recent investor’s note.
In other words, Washington’s efforts to crack down on TikTok over national security concerns could ultimately benefit some of the same American tech companies that Washington has scrutinized for other reasons, including their market dominance and impact on teens.
Even if a ban does not happen, it could still benefit these companies. “This uncertainty could push some TikTok content creators to focus more on, and possibly begin, pushing their audiences to other social network platforms,” Mogharabi said.
At least one company is already seeing a boost. Snap’s stock rose in the days leading up to TikTok’s appearance before Congress amid renewed talks among federal officials of a TikTok ban.
At the hearing on Thursday, TikTok CEO Shou Chew was grilled by lawmakers who expressed deep skepticism about his company’s attempts to protect US user data and ease concerns about its ties to China. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in Beijing and subject to Chinese data request laws that could require it to hand over user data to the government.
Washington Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, opened Thursday’s hearing by telling Shou: “Your platform should be banned.” As the hearing was taking place, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he supports legislation that would effectively ban TikTok and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said TikTok should be “ended one way or another.”
If that happens, Lian Jye Su, an analyst with ABI Search, believes users will follow their favorite TikTok influencers and content creators wherever they go.
“Most users will flock to where the content creators go next,” Su said. “Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube Shorts stand to benefit the most as content creators will still prefer places where they can monetize their content.”
Smaller platforms have the opportunity to gain ground, too, Su said. Short-form video platform Triller, which reportedly has over 450 million users, is actively courting popular content creators from TikTok with cash bonuses, partnerships and other incentives to switch platforms. Meanwhile, Dubsmach – a Reddit-owned short video platform – and Clash, which allows people to create 21-second looping videos, are other platforms that could be increasingly appealing to creators.
For now, talk of a TikTok ban may still be premature. The Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok from the United States unless the app’s Chinese owners agree to spin off their share of the social media platform.
“I strongly doubt this app will go dark,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi told CNN during a primetime special about TikTok on Thursday. He said a sale is most likely.
If the app is sold, that could complicate matters for some US tech platforms.
“For Snap, which has a weaker network effect than Meta, a possibly more trusted US TikTok may make it more difficult to attract users away from or keep them from migrating to TikTok,” Moghaharbi wrote in the investor’s note.
The state of Arkansas has sued TikTok, its parent ByteDance, and Facebook-parent Meta over claims the companies’ products are harmful to users, in the latest effort by public officials to take social media companies to court over mental-health and privacy concerns.
All three lawsuits claim the companies have violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and seek millions, if not billions, in potential fines. The suits were filed in Arkansas state court.
The complaints come amid mounting pressure in Washington on TikTok for its ties to China and as states have grown more aggressive in suing tech companies broadly, particularly on mental health claims. Suits by school districts or county officials in California, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington state have targeted multiple social media platforms over addiction allegations.
The suit against Meta particularly zeroes in on the company’s impact to young users’ mental health, alleging that Meta’s implementation of like buttons, photo tagging, an unending news feed and other features are addictive and “intended to manipulate users’ brains by triggering the release of dopamine.”
In a statement, Meta’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, said the company has invested in “technology that finds and removes content related to suicide, self-injury or eating disorders before anyone reports it to us.”
“We want to reassure every parent that we have their interests at heart in the work we’re doing to provide teens with safe, supportive experiences online,” Davis said in the statement. “These are complex issues, but we will continue working with parents, experts and regulators such as the state attorneys general to develop new tools, features and policies that meet the needs of teens and their families.”
The remaining two suits, both naming ByteDance and TikTok as defendants, target TikTok’s alleged shortcomings in content moderation and also reiterate claims about TikTok’s alleged threat to US national security.
The first suit alleges that TikTok has misled users by identifying its app as suitable for teens on app stores because of the “abundant” presence of content showing profanity, substance use and nudity. The suit further alleges that TikTok’s Chinese sister app, Douyin, does not make such content available within China.
“TikTok poses known risks to young teens that TikTok’s parent company itself finds inappropriate for Chinese users who are the same age,” the complaint said. “Yet TikTok pushes salacious and other mature content to all young U.S. users age 13 and up.”
The second suit against ByteDance and TikTok accuse the companies of having made misleading statements about the reach of Chinese government officials and their purported inability to access TikTok user data. TikTok has migrated US user data to servers operated by the American tech giant Oracle and has established organizational controls intended to prevent unauthorized data access. But, the suit alleges, that does not mean the data is necessarily protected.
“Neither TikTok’s data storage practices, nor its data security practices, negate the applicability of Chinese law to that data or to the individuals and entities who are subject to Chinese law and have access to that data, or the risk of access by the Chinese Government or Communist Party,” the complaint said.
The suit also claims TikTok has misrepresented its approach to privacy and security by omitting the potential risks of Chinese government access from its privacy policies and in its statements to app store operators.
TikTok and ByteDance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a statement announcing the lawsuits, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the suits reflect a “failed status quo.”
“We have to hold Big Tech companies accountable for pushing addictive platforms on our kids and exposing them to a world of inappropriate, damaging content,” Sanders said. “These actions are a long time coming. We have watched over the past decade as one social media company after another has exploited our kids for profit and escaped government oversight.”
NATO has officially banned staffers from downloading the social media app TikTok onto their NATO-provided devices, citing security concerns, according to two NATO officials familiar with the matter.
NATO officials sent a note to staff on Friday morning announcing the ban, the officials said. The note made the ban official, but TikTok was not really usable on NATO-issued devices before, anyway, the officials said, because of internal tech restrictions.
“Cyber security is a top priority for NATO. NATO has robust requirements for determining applications for official business use. TikTok is not accessible on NATO devices,” a senior NATO official told CNN.
NATO is the latest governmental body to ban the app over concerns that the Chinese government could have access to TikTok users’ data through its Chinese parent company, Bytedance. The US, UK, Norway, European Parliament and other nations have already banned the app from government-issued devices.
TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew stressed to US lawmakers earlier this month that the company is completely independent from Beijing, and said that he has “seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data; they have never asked us, we have not provided it.”
He added that TikTok is moving its data into the US, to be stored on US soil by the American company Oracle.
“So the risk would be similar to any government going to an American company, asking for data,” he said.
Still, western governments remain skeptical.
TikTok should be “ended one way or another,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress earlier this month in a separate hearing, on the same day Chew was testifying. “Clearly, we, the administration and others are seized with the challenge that it poses and are taking action to address it.”
China’s Communist Party had “supreme access” to all data held by TikTok’s parent company Bytedance, including on servers in the United States, a former employer who is bringing a wrongful termination lawsuit has alleged.
The allegations in the lawsuit – which Bytedance denies and has vowed to contest – comes at a time of intense scrutiny within the US and other Western nations over what level of control, if any, Beijing is able to exert over TikTok and the social media app’s wildly popular content.
Yintao “Roger” Yu filed a lawsuit of wrongful termination against Bytedance in Superior Court in San Francisco earlier this month. He says he worked at the company from August 2017 to November 2018, as a head of engineering for US operations.
In a new complaint filed on Friday, Yu claimed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had a special office in the company, sometimes referred to as the “Committee,” which monitored Bytedance and “guided how it advanced core Communist values.”
“The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States,” the complaint obtained by CNN read.
Yu’s lawsuit alleges that the company made user data accessible to China’s Communist Party via a backdoor channel, no matter where the data was located.
Yu also claimed that he had observed Bytedance being “responsive to the CCP’s requests” to share, elevate or even remove content, describing Bytedance as “useful propaganda tool” for Beijing’s leaders.
A Bytedance spokesperson has denied Yu’s allegations, saying he worked on an app called Flipagram while at the company, which was discontinued due to business reasons.
“We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,” the spokesperson said to CNN.
“Mr. Yu worked for ByteDance Inc. for less than a year and his employment ended in July 2018,” which Yu disputed in his complaint.
Earlier reporting from Yu’s lawsuit detailed how shortly after he began his job, he realized that Bytedance had for years engaged in what he called a “worldwide scheme” to steal and profit from the content of others.
The scheme involved using software purposely unleashed to “systematically” strip user content from competitors’ websites, chiefly Instagram and Snapchat, and populate its own video services without asking for permission.
The former employee alleged he was “troubled by ByteDance’s efforts to skirt legal and ethical lines.”
Yu is seeking compensatory damages such as lost earnings, injunctive relief and liquidated and punitive damages.
In a statement to CNN, a ByteDance spokesperson said the company is “committed to respecting the intellectual property of other companies, and we acquire data in accordance with industry practices and our global policy.”
The latest allegations come as the hugely popular TikTok app is at risk of being banned by US lawmakers for national security concerns.
The Biden administration has threatened TikTok with a nationwide ban unless its Chinese owners sell their stakes in the company, spelling out an increasingly tense relationship between the two countries. Last month, Montana became the first US state to pass legislation banning TikTok on all personal devices.
At issue is who owns the keys to TikTok’s algorithms and the vast troves of data collected from the 150 million people in the United States who use the app each month.
US officials have widely expressed fears the Chinese government could potentially gain access to TikTok user data through its links to its parent company and that such information could be used to benefit Chinese intelligence or propaganda campaigns.
However, security experts say there is still no public evidence the Chinese government has actually spied on people through TikTok, which doesn’t operate in China.
In March, TikTok’s chief executive Shou Chew testified before Congress, saying that he had “seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that [US user] data; they have never asked us, we have not provided it.”
“Our commitment is to move their data into the United States, to be stored on American soil by an American company, overseen by American personnel. So the risk would be similar to any government going to an American company, asking for data,” Chew said at the hearing.
China has responded to the Biden administration’s demand, saying that it would “firmly” oppose a forced sale of TikTok.
The Chinese government considers some advanced technology, including content recommendation algorithms, to be critical to its national interest. In December, Chinese officials proposed tightening the rules that govern the sale of that technology to foreign buyers.
A sale or divestiture of TikTok would involve the export of technology, so it would need obtain a license and approval from the Chinese government, according to a commerce ministry spokeswoman in March.
TikTok has “more work” to do to meet tough new European standards that are coming for social media and content moderation, according to a top EU official who performed a “stress test” of the company this week.
The report by EU Commissioner Thierry Breton comes ahead of a looming Aug. 25 deadline for platforms such as TikTok to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA) — a package of regulations aimed at battling misinformation, potential privacy abuses and illegal content, among other things.
European Commission staff conducted the TikTok test on Monday at the company’s Dublin offices, according to a statement from the commissioner, and Breton outlined the results of the voluntary inspection to CEO Shou Chew on Tuesday.
“TikTok is dedicating significant resources to compliance,” Breton said, pointing to changes TikTok has made to its recommendation algorithms and its transparency procedures as evidence the company appears to be taking its obligations seriously.
But, he added, the test results also showed “more work is needed to be fully ready for the compliance deadline.”
“Now it is time to accelerate to be fully compliant,” Breton said, indicating that officials will be revisiting at the end of the summer whether TikTok has closed the gap.
TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the test results.
TikTok isn’t the only large tech platform to submit to an EU stress test. Last month, European officials evaluated Twitter’s platform for DSA compliance and also announced plans to stress test Facebook-parent Meta’s services.
