TikTok Facing Legal Backlash Around the World

TikTok is challenging a possible ban or forced sale to new owners in the United States, but has for several years been waging other fights in at least 20 countries.

Russia fined TikTok for not removing prohibited content. The results of a presidential election in Romania were thrown out over concerns the app had been used to spread foreign influence. Albania banned TikTok for a year following the stabbing death of a teenager by another one after the two quarreled online.

“Either TikTok protects the children of Albania, or Albania will protect its children from TikTok,” the prime minister, Edi Rama, said on X.

That was all in just the last month.

This week in the United States, where about 150 million people use the app, TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, are asking the Supreme Court to strike down a law that would force the app to be sold or banned.

TikTok has confronted legal and political scrutiny around the world in recent years, facing outright or partial bans in at least 20 countries, as governments have grown alarmed by its ties to China and its wide influence, especially among young people.

Despite the mounting scrutiny, TikTok remains incredibly popular worldwide. More than a billion people use the app every month.

TikTok’s novelty comes from its proprietary algorithm, which recommends a constant stream of content, mostly short videos, calibrated to keep people scrolling. ByteDance pioneered the technology in 2016 with TikTok’s sister app, Douyin, which has become one of China’s most popular apps and drives the majority of the company’s revenue. ByteDance knew it could be a hit overseas and launched TikTok in 2017.

But as TikTok’s algorithm captured attention spans around the world, it alarmed lawmakers, who say TikTok has quickly turned from a domain of cat videos and dance trends into a potentially disruptive social, political and economic force.

Officials from Montana to New Zealand have warned that TikTok could be used to incite violence, spread false information and worsen mental health. Lawmakers also worry TikTok could share user data like location and browsing history with the Chinese government. Young people need to be protected from “the frightening pitfalls of the algorithm,” said Mr. Rama, the Albanian prime minister.

TikTok has insisted that the concerns are overblown. It has teams dedicated to combating influence operations, whose work it makes public, the company said in a statement. TikTok’s algorithm, which it aims to “maintain content neutrality,” ranks content based on what users express interest in, the company said.

TikTok has said ByteDance is majority-owned by global investors. At the same time, the Chinese government has claimed authority to oppose any sale.

As other Chinese companies look to do more business overseas, TikTok has become both a model and a cautionary tale. The app showed that a new kind of entertainment first popularized in China could catch on elsewhere. But it also paved the way for blowback against Chinese apps like Temu and Shein.

“It feels like every Chinese entrepreneur needs a political science or international relations degree to be able to navigate their future now,” said Kevin Xu, the U.S.-based founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in artificial intelligence technologies.

Other companies with global internet products, like Meta and Google, also face scrutiny around the world, said Jianggan Li, the chief executive of Momentum Works, a consultancy in Singapore. “But being U.S. companies, they do not face the mistrust that TikTok has faced in the eyes of politicians and regulators in the West,” Mr. Li said.

Here is how governments have gone after TikTok.

Total ban: India and Nepal

A ban in the United States could cut TikTok off from one of its most important markets. But TikTok has already gone through the experience of losing what at the time was its largest audience. The Indian government banned the app in 2020 after India’s simmering geopolitical conflict with China boiled over into hand-to-hand combat along their shared border.

TikTok vanished from app stores, and its website was blocked, forcing creators who had made their living on the app to rebuild their audiences on other platforms. A few homegrown alternatives emerged, but American tech giants were the biggest winners. Both YouTube and Instagram now have roughly twice as many users in India as they have in the United States.

Officials in neighboring Nepal took TikTok offline for nearly a year over its refusal to curb content the government described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” The ban was overturned in August after the current prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, took charge of the government for the fourth time.

Fines and forced local tie-ups: Russia and Indonesia

The Russian government has fined TikTok repeatedly for allowing content to circulate that does not abide by the country’s censorship rules, including on topics like sex, gender and feminism. The two most recent fines, levied by Russian courts in the past six months, added up to about $90,000.

In Indonesia, TikTok launched online shopping, which it is betting big on as a new revenue stream. The app has nearly as many users in Indonesia, the largest country in Southeast Asia, as in the United States. But in 2023, the government passed a law that forced TikTok to shut its online shopping business down in a matter of days.

TikTok Shop was able to reopen only after it had merged operations with Indonesia’s biggest e-commerce company, Tokopedia. It has been slow going for many shop owners rebuilding their audiences, but for TikTok, the ordeal came with a perk: access to a network of delivery drivers and logistics services built to get packages across Indonesia’s 17,000 islands.

Blocked on government devices: Taiwan, Britain, Canada and others

Some governments have tried to balance concerns about TikTok’s security with free expression.

Taiwan banned the app from government devices in 2019. But officials say they aren’t contemplating a wholesale ban because they do not want to curb Taiwan’s culture of public debate. Britain, Australia and France, as well as the executive arm of the European Union and New Zealand’s Parliament, have adopted the same approach.

TikTok was already banned from government-issued mobile devices in Canada when the government directed TikTok to close its offices in the country in November, citing national security risks posed by ByteDance.

In documents filed in Canadian court last month to challenge the order, TikTok claimed that the Canadian government had directed it to delay overdue paperwork until the United States had decided on its approach to the company.