TikTok Bans: Security Concerns or Sinophobia?

19 countries worldwide have enacted at least sector-wide TikTok bans, eight of which have made the social media app not only illegal on government and public sector employees' smartphones like the United States Canada or the United Kingdom, but also on those owned by the general public. Most of these countries are situated on the Asian continent, with Albania's recently announced one-year blanket ban being the only one of this type in Europe.

The most notable example for a wholesale ban is India. In 2019, the country banned the short-form video app for some time, allegedly due to concerns about spreading content unsafe for minors. This ban proved temporary, but in June 2020, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok, to curb the perceived spread of Chinese influence in the country. Other countries with general bans include Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Iran and Jordan.

After a turbulent year for the social media platform's owner ByteDance in the U.S., a similar ban is set to take effect on Sunday, January 19, after last-minute appeals to the Supreme Court have failed. The only way for TikTok to continue being available in the United States is for its owner ByteDance to divest the site and sell it to a domestic company. At the time of writing on January 17, according to Reuters, President-elect Donald Trump is allegedly weighing a "political resolution" to preserve the site, while sitting President Joe Biden could potentially postpone the ban and let the incoming Trump administration decide how to proceed were open to at least extending the deadline for a potential sale.

While officials claim that it's unclear whether the Chinese government can extract and use data of Western TikTok users, which poses too big of a security risk, critics of the push for a blanket ban on TikTok argue that the motivations are either latent sinophobia or limiting China's soft power in a new Cold War. However, the looming ban has driven many TikTok users to the so-called "Chinese Instagram" Xiaohongshu, also known as Rednote or "Little Red Book". The app, which combines an e-commerce platform with lifestyle and travel content published by its users, climbed the ranks in both Google's and Apple's app stores and held the top spot for free apps this past Monday, as NBC News reports.