It Was Never About TikTok

The Supreme Court recently upheld the TikTok ban, a topic emblematic of East-West tensions in the evolving landscape of social media. Photo courtesy of Solen Feyissa.

TikTok has become a focal point of contention in the ongoing power struggle between the West and East. Its global success has dismantled the notion of a bordered world, displacing nations into a digital space where hierarchies of power and influence no longer follow traditional structures. This displacement reflects a familiar and violent cycle of globalization: technological advancement and innovation are historically accompanied by a growing fear of otherness. 

In March 2024, U.S. lawmakers passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, prohibiting Chinese ownership of TikTok. This legislation, widely known as the “TikTok ban,” was scheduled to take effect on January 19, 2025. However, the ban was in effect for only about 12 hours before it came back online. A second “ban” date was set for April 5, 2025, later postponed to June 19—but neither went through. Now, Trump has extended the deadline once again, pushing it to September 17, 2025. 

The push for a ban arguably stems from anxieties over foreign control of data and its perceived implications for national security—framed, as the title of the bill claims, as an effort by the government to “protect” Americans from a “foreign adversary.” Yet despite the popular narrative, TikTok doesn’t appear to collect any more personal information than Facebook. Why is it, then, that TikTok alone faces the threat of a ban?

In both China and America—two nations some consider irreconciliable—the culture of technology remains an equally controversial topic. In China, laptops are opened to a closed internet. In America, foreign technology is accessible until it outpaces our own. For these nations, the unfamiliar is an obsession: constantly policed and politicized. The politicization of internet freedom, in many ways, reflects how efforts to take down TikTok are partially rooted in a Western discomfort with Eastern innovation. 

As the world has advanced, America has spiraled deeper into its fear of the unknown, subscribing to the narrative of techno-Orientalism: a way of thinking that imagines Eastern technologies as dangerously threatening and advanced. Logically, this portrayal reinforces the perception of Asians as fundamentally “other,” projecting upon Eastern bodies an artificial inhumanity—crafting a narrative of Asia as powerful but alien. In the Senate hearing last February, these anxieties came to a head as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas repeatedly failed to understand the distinction between Singaporean and Chinese citizenship. While grilling TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on the app’s national security risks, Cotton persistently implied that Chew’s nationality itself constituted a threat to national security. Cotton’s inability—or refusal—to distinguish between Singapore and China reflects the ease with which America has conflated complex identities into a singular narrative of Chinese danger. Cotton’s reductionist thinking not only reinforces xenophobic rhetoric but compromises meaningful discourse by flattening nuances in identity into over-generalized binaries of “us” and “other.” Thus, the question ultimately comes down to this: how much of this fear of TikTok is rooted in its alarming alienness, rather than any true threat? 

One factor that may contribute to such fear may be the hidden—and thus, widely regarded as secretive—nature of TikTok’s algorithm, which, admittedly, makes it feel less “known” to the Western imagination. Much like how Sony and Nintendo’s rapid success in Western markets during the 1980s aroused Orientalist-fueled panic, TikTok embodies and exacerbates American anxieties toward non-Western technological dominance—whether Japanese or Chinese or otherwise—in a world shaped by media and technology. Today, TikTok dominates Western markets: it has over 1.5 billion monthly users, including approximately 136 million in the United States alone, outpacing even established social media platforms like Instagram. Its advanced algorithm not only directs consumer behaviors and e-commerce supply chains but positions TikTok itself as a powerful mediator of cultural and political discourse. The American fear of TikTok is more than a concern about competition—it is rooted in deeper anxieties over the power of a non-Western entity with the ability to command American public life. As a result, proponents of the ban, such as Senator Cotton, justify its necessity despite TikTok’s compliance with U.S. law. Thus, TikTok has come to stand as a symbol in a greater narrative—one not about privacy, but power. 

In a discussion on America’s stance on foreign technology, a boy in my English class once turned to me and joked, “I bet your dad is a spy for TikTok.” In the crossfire of Eastern obscurity and Western scrutiny, I didn’t know how to respond. The true consequence—and culprit—of the TikTok ban is the vilification of Asian foreignness. The stigma of the unknown Asian body is what leads to the fear of “foreign” professionals like my father. In a sense, my father embodies the paradox of TikTok’s success in America. Just as the boy in my English class assumed that my father’s career in technology must mean that he was a spy, immigrants—whether individuals or social media apps—are at once desired and feared. They are celebrated for their contributions even as they are simultaneously cast as dangerous, threatening. This becomes the paradox of otherness: the very qualities that allow immigrants or foreign-made apps like TikTok to succeed are also the same ones that render them suspect. 

But this fear is not limited to Chinese foreignness; in fact, it extends to the general notion of the “foreign.” Last summer, there was similar privacy and national security hysteria over the Russian-made FaceApp, a program that takes photos of people and “ages” them with AI. It is the harmful homogenization of foreign identities that crafts a narrative of “Chinese danger” when, in reality, TikTok stores its user information solely in the U.S. and Singapore—not China. This blanket conflation of foreign technology with foreign threat is so damaging because it distorts non-American technology into a narrative of foreboding foreign peril. As impossible as it seems, technology can only persist and evolve through human interference. The digital lives on through its association with society and is therefore inevitably influenced by societal biases. 

TikTok’s rapid ascent and global popularity destabilized traditional boundaries between the East and the West, forcing the world to contend with an open digital space where old hierarchies of power feel far less certain. This shift feeds into the larger dynamics of globalization, where advancements in technology and innovation are often followed by growing anxieties over foreign control and otherness. In such a global landscape, the public discourse around TikTok reveals that our fear of the foreign is not innate, but constructed.

Bohan Gao is a staff writer for CPR majoring in classics. A first-generation Chinese American from North Carolina, she is interested in the evolution of cultural narratives and heritage. She can be reached at bg2885@columbia.edu.