On TikTok, Users Thumb Their Noses at Looming Ban

Over the last week, the videos started appearing on TikTok from users across the United States.

They all made fun of the same thing: how the app’s ties to China made it a national security threat. Many implied that their TikTok accounts had each been assigned an agent of the Chinese government to spy on them through the app — and that the users would miss their personal spies.

“May we meet again in another life,” one user wrote in a video goodbye set to Whitney Houston’s cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” The video included an A.I.-generated image of a Chinese military officer.

The videos were just one way that some of TikTok’s 170 million monthly U.S. users were reacting as they prepared for the app to disappear from the country as soon as Sunday.

The Supreme Court is set to rule on a federal law that required TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app by Jan. 19 or face a ban in the United States. U.S. officials have said China could use TikTok to harvest Americans’ private data and spread covert disinformation. TikTok, which has said a sale is impossible and challenged the law, is now awaiting the Supreme Court’s response.

The possibility that the justices will uphold the law has set off a palpable sense of grief and dark humor across the app. Some users have posted videos suggesting ways to circumvent a ban with technological workarounds. Others have downloaded another Chinese app, Xiaohongshu, also known as “Red Note,” to thumb their noses at the U.S. government’s concerns about TikTok’s ties to China.

The videos highlight the collision taking place online between the law, which Congress passed with wide support last year, and everyday users of TikTok, who are dismayed that the app may soon disappear.

“Much of my TikTok feed now is TikTokers ridiculing the U.S. government, TikTokers thanking their Chinese spy as a form of ridicule,” said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University and an expert on the global regulation of new technologies. “TikTokers recognize that they are not likely to be manipulated by anyone. They are actually quite sophisticated about the information they’re receiving.”

TikTok declined to comment on the users’ references to its ties to China.

Some users are not willing to give up the app — or their supposed spies — so easily.

Hundreds of TikTok videos over the last week have cataloged how teenagers could keep using the app in the United States, according to a review by The New York Times. One of the most popular methods described is the use of a VPN, or a virtual private network, which can mask a user’s location and make it appear that the person is elsewhere.

“They can’t actually ban TikTok in the U.S. because VPNs are not banned,” Sasha Casey, a TikTok user, said in a recent video that was liked over 60,000 times. “Use a VPN. And send a picture to Congress while you do it, because that’s what I’ll be doing.”

While VPNs can make it appear that a phone, a laptop or another electronic device is in a remote location, it is not clear if the technology can circumvent the ban. A device’s real location is stored in many places, including in the app store that was used to download TikTok.

TikTok fans also seem to be behind the sudden surge in popularity for Xiaohongshu, the most downloaded free app on Tuesday and Wednesday in the U.S. Apple Store. Hundreds of millions of people in China use the app, which, like TikTok, features short videos and text-based posts. Xiaohongshu means “little red book” in Mandarin.

Mr. Chander anticipates that the Supreme Court will uphold the ban law this week, though he believes that TikTok has the winning case. He said the downloads of Red Note and the Chinese spy memes showed that many Americans did not agree with their government’s security concerns, particularly at the expense of free speech.

“When the United States shutters a massive free expression service, which our democratic allies have not shuttered, it will make us the censor and put us in the unusual position of silencing expression,” Mr. Chander said. “It will make Americans who use TikTok really distrustful of the U.S. government as carrying their best interests.”