The Biden administration recently told TikTok that it wanted the app’s Chinese owners to sell their holdings or face a possible ban in the United States. But that plan hit a new snag on Thursday when the Chinese government said it would oppose the sale.
If the White House can’t force a sale, that would effectively leave it with two options to resolve concerns that TikTok could expose Americans’ data to Beijing or act as a conduit for misinformation.
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The White House could try to ban the app within the United States, possibly cutting off its access to the Apple and Google app stores. But that might be impossible without legislation from Congress giving the administration more power. After former President Donald J. Trump tried to ban the app, federal courts ruled that he did not have the power to do so, limiting the options available to President Biden.
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The administration could also review a deal it had been negotiating with TikTok for years that would allow it to continue operating in the United States. Under the proposal, the app would store the data of its US users on Oracle servers in the United States. The US company would also monitor how the app’s algorithm recommends content to users, as a possible protection against the app being used to spread misinformation and Chinese government propaganda. But that proposal has been met with skepticism from some of the administration’s top players, including those at the Justice Department and the White House.
Any decision to remove the app, whether by banning it for 150 million users in the United States or blocking further downloads, would also be politically fraught for Biden. No one encapsulated the political dilemma more concisely than Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, who is at the center of new export controls imposed on high-tech goods to China.
“The politics in me believe that they will literally lose every voter under the age of 35, forever,” he recently told Bloomberg News.
Ms. Raimondo and other officials are quick to add that bad policy is not a reason to back out of a full ban if the threat to national security justifies it. The issue is made more complex by the fact that some of the world’s largest news organizations, including The New York Times, now have TikTok accounts, which means that closing the app could appear to be shutting down the spread of news based. in facts to counter Chinese Disinformation.
