Cybersecurity expert Jim Lewis was walking through Washington earlier this month when he bumped into a senior executive at the wildly popular social media app TikTok.
“I asked him, ‘how’s it going?’ and he said, ‘things are going great!’” Lewis says of their encounter one block from the White House grounds. “He was really happy. They don’t seem particularly fazed by what’s going on.”
On paper, the Chinese-owned social media app has plenty of cause for concern. For more than five years leading American politicians have been calling TikTok a tool of espionage, surveillance, and censorship. A law signed by then-President Joe Biden last year required the app to be sold to a non-Chinese buyer by January 19, or else face a ban in the United States. TikTok even shut down briefly just before the ban was set to take effect.
In reality, the executive’s attitude is less surprising. Political and legal pressure on TikTok has declined sharply ever since then-candidate Donald Trump came out against banning the app on the campaign trail last year. As president, Trump has not enforced the ban even though Chinese company ByteDance still owns TikTok; instead, he has imposed a series of extensions to the sale deadline, the latest of which expires on Thursday. Trump has already signaled he will again delay enforcement.
TikTok is meanwhile operating as it was before the legislation went into effect. And while last year eliminating ByteDance’s control of the app was a hot political issue supported by top Republicans like then-Senator Marco Rubio, along with prominent Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, it has since fallen way down the agenda, even amid intensifying trade tensions between the U.S. and China.
The app’s reversal of fortune shows how the views of politicians in Washington — who overwhelmingly voted in favor of the TikTok law last spring, across partisan divides — have grown increasingly divorced from those of the general public in a key area of tech competition between the U.S. and China.
Congresswoman Kat Cammack questions TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during a hearing on safeguarding American data, March 23, 2023. Credit: Kat Cammack
“We’ve had the same national security mandarins telling us for years that we were going to win in Afghanistan and Iraq,” says Lewis, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who leads technology-focused track II dialogues with Chinese counterparts. “You can’t lose credibility, and then come along and say this social media platform largely inhabited by teenagers is a national security risk.”
Opinion polling shows such skepticism is rising as broader feelings towards China have moderated. Less than half (49 percent) of Americans now believe TikTok is a national security risk compared to 59 percent in 2023, a Pew Research Center survey conducted in February and March found.
“The public is fatigued,” says Kaiser Kuo, a China analyst and the host of the Sinica podcast. “There just hasn’t been any evidence shared that the national security concerns are substantiated…There’s a lot of the boy who cried wolf.”
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
We don’t see among TikTok users a real sense that [their] data is being siphoned off by the Chinese government, even though TikTok users are well aware of the U.S. government’s claims. Neither party wants to be the one that removed access to TikTok for 170 million Americans.
Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University
The benign nature of much of the app’s content, ranging from lip syncing pop songs to cooking tutorials, is another likely reason why its army of mostly young users are happy to overlook any threat it might pose.
The result is that banning TikTok is simply no longer politically popular. Trump’s own shift reflects broader public attitudes: After leading the charge to ban the app during his first term, he pledged to “save” it ahead of his January inauguration, which TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew attended.
In turn, the softening public mood has allowed the Trump administration to avoid enforcing the 2024 TikTok legislation. The law’s terms allow the president to extend the TikTok sale deadline for 90 days past January 19, but only if he certifies that a legally binding deal is in progress. Trump has not done that, but has instead issued two executive orders delaying enforcement for 75 days at a time. Despite rumors of potential buyers for the app, no deal appears imminent.
The legal uncertainty around TikTok extends to companies that service the app in the U.S., such as app store-owners Apple and Google or cloud provider Oracle. They are potentially liable for fines of up to $5,000 per U.S. user for continuing to provide services to TikTok after the legislation came into effect. Chew said in Senate testimony last January that TikTok has 170 million monthly users in the United States, meaning that, in theory, their fines could reach up to $850 billion each.
Apple and Google did remove TikTok from their app stores after Trump’s inauguration, but they brought it back three weeks later after receiving a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi, which has not been publicly released.
In turn, any fines now seem unlikely to ever happen, says Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University. “Companies have reviewed this extremely carefully. They are not shooting from the hip.”
“We don’t see among TikTok users a real sense that [their] data is being siphoned off by the Chinese government, even though TikTok users are well aware of the U.S. government’s claims,” he adds. “Neither party wants to be the one that removed access to TikTok for 170 million Americans.”
Some of the TikTok law’s proponents have meanwhile gone quiet. Shortly after TikTok’s momentary January shutdown, Senators Pete Ricketts (R-NE) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) released a joint statement saying that the legislation “risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it. Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date.”
Neither Ricketts and Cotton responded to requests for comment about whether they still view the recent delays as legal.
For sure, some are still pressing for the law to be enforced: The Trump administration’s delays are “totally lawless,” says Alan Rozenshtein, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. “The companies subject to the law are still immensely exposed to legal liability if the president or a future president changes his mind. I think what they’re doing is insane.”
Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who voted against the bill last year, now says the Trump administration should enforce it. “The Supreme Court correctly upheld the law in its January ruling that TikTok must be divested from Chinese ownership, and a sale must be implemented without further delays,” he told The Wire in a statement.
But those concerned about TikTok have little recourse to compel enforcement from the administration, Georgetown’s Chander says.
“It’s not clear who is harmed by an ongoing relationship between ByteDance and TikTok,” he explains. “A competitor simply can’t say ‘why aren’t you enforcing a law against my enemy?’”
Noah Berman is a staff writer for The Wire based in New York. He previously wrote about economics and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe and PBS News. He graduated from Georgetown University.
