A New York Times editorial (8/8/25) insisted that an anti-TikTok law “did not target speech based on its content, function or purpose”—but in fact congressional opponents argued for a ban based on claims that too many videos critical of Israel were being shared on the app (FAIR.org, 11/13/23).
A New York Times editorial (8/8/25), headlined “Trump Is Letting TikTok (and China) Win,” illustrates why the paper is ill-equipped to counter the tyranny of this out-of-control administration. The editorial criticized President Donald Trump for being authoritarian, but also not authoritarian enough.
To review, Trump in his first term, along with congressional right-wingers, raised concerns about the social media app TikTok, largely because it was owned by a Chinese firm, ByteDance (FAIR.org, 3/14/24). Many attempts had been made to ban the app (FAIR.org, 5/25/23), but under the presidency of Joe Biden, the federal government enacted a law to force a sale of the app that would divest it from Chinese ownership (CNN, 4/24/24). The argument had been that the app’s content contained propaganda, and that data collection by a Chinese firm posed a national security threat (FAIR.org, 11/13/23, 12/6/24, 1/23/25).
All of this could lead to a ban of the app. The BBC (6/19/25) explained that if no deal is reached in September TikTok could “face a US ban and be pulled from app stores.” It noted, “The executive orders extending the time to find a buyer do not overturn the sell-or-ban law passed by Congress and upheld by the US Supreme Court,” meaning “a ban remains at least a legal possibility.”
Free press and anti-censorship activists have opposed efforts to ban TikTok, saying such concerns are overblown, and are in any case equally applicable to US-based social media like Meta and X. Content-based government censorship of social media, they warned, generally takes us into authoritarian territory. As I wrote last year (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), citing the University of Chicago’s Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24), “The corporate structure of ByteDance does not indicate that China’s Communist Party has firm control on day-to-day operations as the US government contends.”
Trump has since changed his tune on TikTok, and has delayed implementation of the law, and so the video app has lived in limbo since Trump began his second term (AP, 1/19/25). It isn’t lost on anyone that the publicity-obsessed former reality television star has quite a following on the app (Reuters, 6/3/24). TikTok is also reportedly in talks to form a US partnership with Oracle, which has been described as called Oracle the “Trump administration’s favorite tech company” (Slate, 9/14/20).
The ban had bipartisan support, and was upheld by the Supreme Court. Alas, the Times is disappointed that since Trump’s inauguration, his “administration has simply refused to enforce the law.” This leaves TikTok free to “operate as before,” thus allowing the “ruling Communist Party” to continue “to amass personal data about Americans and shape national discourse through its secretive algorithm for promoting videos.”
To be sure, the Times editorial makes a fair point in the first half. If you leave aside the substance of the law, it’s a real problem that a far-right president is picking and choosing what laws will actually be applied. As TikTok lingers in limbo, the situation has given him leverage of Big Tech, and he’s shrunk congressional authority by ignoring his mandate to enforce the law. Given everything else Trump’s done to control media, and attack civil rights and public safety, the Times is right to raise the alarm bell on anything that undermines the rule of law.
Uncensored speech is for suckers
“Banning [TikTok] it or forcing it to be sold off wouldn’t be a bad idea, wrote Tim Wu and Peter Harrell (New York Times, 3/18/23), but it “accounts for just a small part of the Chinese technological surveillance threat.”
It earlier ran an op-ed (3/18/23) by two former Biden administration officials that said the federal government should have “the ability to ban TikTok,” but that banning the platform alone didn’t go far enough in restricting Chinese-owned tech. Concerns that such bans are incompatible with an “open and democratic country” are “misplaced,” it said, because being “an open and democratic country does not mean being a sucker.” Free speech absolutism is unmanly on the world stage, in other words, and such a ban would justifiably be an eye for an eye.
“Accepting unequal treatment is not a badge of honor,” the pair, Tim Wu and Peter Harrell, argued. “The United States would be justified in responding to China’s limits on US companies by imposing its own limits.”
After the Supreme Court upheld the ban, the Times offered an op-ed (1/19/25) by a 17-year-old at a Manhattan private school who pleaded for government intervention to break her of her addiction to the app. It’s a moving testimony, but such an argument could be applied to social media generally, or even smartphones, a place the Times (whose subscribers are roughly 95% online) might not want to go.
Silencing voices on Taiwan—or Gaza?
The problem with TikTok, the recent New York Times editorial (8/8/25) said, is that the app’s algorithm doesn’t just promote the most-liked content:
Instead, the researchers found, pro-China videos (including those with patriotic scenes and tourism promotion) received more views than their number of likes suggested they should. Anti-China videos (such as those honoring the Tiananmen Square protests) received fewer. This combination is a sign that TikTok’s algorithm amplifies pro-China videos and suppresses anti-China content. Tellingly, the same patterns do not hold on YouTube.
Other studies also found evidence of TikTok’s bias. These findings suggest that TikTok is already a vehicle for propaganda, potentially influencing Americans’ opinions about issues like the future of Taiwan and China’s repression of predominantly Muslim Uyghurs.
You’d be hard pressed to find any media—whether it’s social media or the corporate press—that doesn’t have some kind of bias when it comes to hot button issues. For example, since Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk and became X, the site has amplified more right-wing views (Bloomberg, 6/12/24; PBS, 8/13/24), and has increasingly agreed to censorship requests by authoritarian governments (Guardian, 4/4/23; Middle East Eye, 2/14/25).
Things aren’t much rosier at Meta, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shifted his politics to the right in response to the second Trump administration (NBC, 1/8/25). Since the war in Gaza started, Human Rights Watch (12/21/23) reported that
Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media.
The Times might be right that TikTok users might be influenced to take a particular view on Taiwan, but then FAIR (e.g., 3/13/24, 10/7/24, 5/16/25, 8/4/25) and other media critics would say the same thing about Times coverage of Israel/Palestine. (Recall that Congress passed the TikTok ban largely out of concern that young people were getting too much news about the genocide in Gaza—FAIR.org, 5/8/24).
‘They seek to weaken the US’
Treating free speech and security as being at odds, as the New York Times (1/10/25) does, is a sure-fire way to get less free speech.
The New York Times dismissed First Amendment concerns with the forced sale of TikTok, like Wu and Harrell did, because the law was upheld by a conservative Supreme Court that has given the Trump administration a slew of other victories (Reuters, 6/13/25; NPR, 6/27/25; USA Today, 7/4/25). Further, it said, “During the Cold War, Soviet organizations would not have been allowed to own Life magazine, NBC or American radio stations.” Times opinion page editorial director David Leonhardt (1/10/25) made the same point earlier this year.
In other words, the Times accepts as a given that the United States citizenry are engaged in an existential and long-term ideological war with China. Thus, the First Amendment’s presumption that citizens are free to seek out whatever ideas they choose is no longer operational, because of “national security.” Warned the Times: “China’s leaders have made clear that they seek to weaken the United States globally and strengthen other authoritarian leaders, most notably Vladimir Putin of Russia.”
It’s no use bickering with the Times’ worldview; its editors surely see no problem with the US seeking economic and military dominance over other countries, or with its historic alliances with tyrants abroad. Nor could it ever accept the fact that China’s global ambitions are normal for an industrial superpower, or that it is applying soft power globally largely because of a vacuum left by the US (Politico, 7/11/25).
But the Times must be confronted with the hard truth that it is demanding more authoritarian action from Trump’s government. The idea that a media organization could be using bias to steer public opinion in one direction or another is the rationale the Trump administration has offered to defend its attacks on CBS, ABC, NPR, PBS and the AP.
The Times (e.g., 2/4/25) has normally not supported Trump’s impulses here. But Trump and the Times share a distaste for Beijing, and therefore the paper is asking the former to unleash his anti-media impulses against TikTok. Here the Times seems to be trying to rewrite the first line of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem: “First they came for the Communists—and that was OK, because they have made clear that they seek to weaken the United States globally.”
But protecting media from Trump is not a part-time job; he can’t be given an exception here just this one time because of some carve-out for the Chinese menace. We can confidently assume that any excuse he’s allowed to shut down one outlet will be used against others; if TikTok can be squelched because it’s foreign-owned, why not the Guardian—or Al Jazeera, which unlike the video platform is owned outright by an authoritarian government?
Too close for comfort?
Pew (1/17/25) notes that nearly 2 in 5 adults under 29 regularly get news from TikTok.
The New York Times’ hostility toward TikTok might not just be ideological, but about business, as the social media app, thought to be mainly the stuff of funny videos for pure entertainment, is now part of the actual news industry. Pew Research (1/17/25) said:
TikTok has become an important news source for many Americans. About half of TikTok users (52%)—equivalent to 17% of all US adults—say they regularly get news on the site.
By comparison, Pew (6/10/25) finds that 19% of US adults regularly get news from the New York Times.
Regardless of the concerns about social media becoming a news source, the impulse to ban an outlet over anticipated problems is the stuff of authoritarianism, and institutions that want to retain their monopoly power—not of a healthy democracy.
In a way, the Times editorial board is simply too close ideologically to Trump on this score to maintain any credibility as a check on federal power. Trump’s failure to enforce the ban is a brief reprieve that comes with problems, as the Times notes. The answer is not for Trump to keep going like this, but for Congress to do the right thing, and repeal its censorious law.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.