In 2020, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States recommended to President Trump that the social media app TikTok be divested from its Chinese-controlled parent company, ByteDance, due to national security concerns. President Trump affirmed that recommendation by issuing an Executive Order but several courts ruled that he overstepped his executive authority.

In 2024, strong bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress passed legislation banning foreign adversaries like China from controlling media platforms in the United States. The bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee – Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner said, “We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok – a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP].”

Since ByteDance is controlled by the CCP, China effectively controls the algorithm that feeds users videos and they have access to the private data of millions of Americans. Congressman Michael Waltz, President-elect Trump’s designee to be National Security Advisor, has said, “We should not allow our greatest adversary to access 150 million Americans and their data.”

Karoline Leavitt, who will serve as President Trump’s press secretary, has expressed concern about the CCP’s control over content disseminated on TikTok. “They are pushing algorithms that are very damaging to the intellectual curiosity and to the ideology of young Americans today,” Leavitt said last December.

The legislation passed by Congress and signed into law in April 2024 gives ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that will be reached in January 2025, and could be extended into President Trump’s next term.

Major American companies and prominent financial leaders have expressed an interest in purchasing TikTok from ByteDance, so that can be done without any disruption to the millions of Americans who use the social media app.

Nonetheless, the CCP is objecting to the requirement that ByteDance relinquish its ownership of TikTok. ByteDance and some prominent American investors are

waging a campaign to persuade President-elect Trump to exempt them from the requirement to sell TikTok.

ByteDance and their advocates argue that the requirement infringes on free speech, but that argument misses the mark. When he took his Executive Action, President Trump recognized that we should not allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information. Nor should we allow the CCP to indoctrinate young Americans with their harmful ideology.