The Chinese Communist Party has a long, proud history of spycraft and theft.
1. They hack U.S. defense contractors to steal technology that is then crudely reconstructed into 5th-generation fighter jets that couldn’t outrun a decommissioned Concorde and warships whose only capabilities are 1.) combustion and 2.) floating (optional).
2. They honeypot many of America’s least fuckable local politicians.
3. They lie their way into protected facilities and strip their targets of technology transfer limb from limb.
If that wasn’t enough, they also force all foreign-owned companies conducting business in China to hire Chinese Communist Party representatives into their organizations. The explicit purpose of these party-sponsored scarecrows is to monitor that company’s compliance with CCP orthodoxy... And, of course, for spying and stealing.
So, when U.S. officials began questioning whether a Chinese-owned social media app might pose a threat to national security, you could say there was precedent for their concern:
December 2019: TikTok was banned on all government-owned mobile devices of U.S. Army and Navy service members.
December 2022: Congress banned TikTok on all House-managed mobile devices.
March 2023: Amidst data security concerns, the Biden Administration ordered all government agency staff to delete TikTok from federal devices and systems.
June 2023: State employees in 34/50 states are prohibited from using TikTok on government devices.
As of June 2025: TikTok is banned on all government devices for state and federal employees.
Then early last year, seemingly out of nowhere, things got very confrontational, very quickly.
In early March of 2024, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50-0 to advance a bill that would force ByteDance to divest from TikTok US, or face a nationwide ban.
This caught everyone off guard: The American public, the American Congress, the President (probably), and most of all TikTok.
In response, TikTok’s PR team immediately went into DEFCON 1, crafting a new comms strategy before the bill could hit the House floor for an official vote. Their message was simple:
Congress is attempting to ban TikTok. 
|
