US Power Play Over TikTok Did Nothing to Protect Americans

In December 2024, we argued on Tech Policy Press that blanket platform restrictions create what they aim to prevent. Restrictions don’t mitigate risks; they displace them, driving users to less regulated spaces, fragmenting oversight, and reducing transparency while claiming to increase security. The TikTok saga has now supplied an unusually clean empirical sequence: a deadline, a brief shutdown, a user displacement, a return, a year of non-enforcement, a settlement, and an immediate controversy over what the new arrangement would allow. Within days of the deal closing, lawmakers from both parties questioned whether a structure that leaves ByteDance’s recommendation algorithm IP in Beijing under a licensing agreement actually satisfies the law, while users raised alarms about expanded data-sharing provisions in the updated privacy policy and alleged suppression of political content.

The paradox we identified didn’t just hold. It evolved through four distinct stages that reveal how the system processes threats it cannot resolve. What began as displacement became reproduction; reproduction enabled domestication; domestication settled into deferral. Each stage absorbed the tensions of the one before. None resolved them.