Taiwan’s liberal TikTok paradox

The United States has steadily tightened its grip on TikTok, the hugely popular video-sharing app from Chinese company ByteDance, since early 2020. The crackdown began in January, during President Donald Trump’s first term, when the Pentagon deemed the app a security risk. and banned its use by military personnel. Tensions further increased under the Biden administration in April 2024 with the signing of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which required TikTok to divest its US operations by January 19, 2025 or leave the market altogether.

Although TikTok quickly raised a constitutional challenge, the courts upheld the measure on national security grounds. The case is now before the Supreme Court, where President-elect Trump has filed an amicus brief urging a suspension of the ban, insisting that his new administration must have time to find an alternative solution.

In contrast to the fiery debates in the United States over the regulation of TikTok, Taiwanese policy discourse has remained remarkably muted. Very much JapanDespite concerns that TikTok could influence public opinion and fuel disinformation campaigns, Taiwan has so far limited its response to a 2019 ban on the app on government devices – a very targeted effort to address cybersecurity concerns, rather than a blanket ban.

As relations between the two countries deteriorate, Taiwan’s reluctance to impose stricter controls seems timid, if not hypocritical. The core problem is that policymakers are afraid of restricting freedom of expression and unleashing a political backlash. These concerns are becoming increasingly urgent in light of escalating information manipulation augmented by AIand for Taiwan in particular, the strategic ambitions of its geopolitical opponent, China.

To echo Tim Wu from Columbia Law School, a liberal legal framework that views freedom of expression merely as a shield against government censorship is in danger of becoming outdated. The problem lies in the fact that freedom of expression is interpreted too narrowly – focusing solely on preventing government interference – while overlooking how its protection can also impose a positive duty on governments to protect an environment conducive to robust public debate.

Nevertheless, it would also be useful not to simply frame the TikTok controversy as an issue of state censorship only in domestic situations, without taking seriously the extraterritorial influence of social media platforms controlled by illiberal powers. The deeper issue at stake, then, points to a much more fundamental clash of governance systems, with liberal openness battling the menacing influence of authoritarian encroachments.

Extraterritorial algorithmic moderation

If The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University for example, shows that there appears to be a large disparity in the number of posts on sensitive China-related topics, such as Tibet, Hong Kong protests and the Uyghur issue, between TikTok and Instagram. Despite receiving almost twice as many likes, anti-China content on TikTok showed a views-to-likes ratio that was 87 percent lower than pro-China content.

Such algorithmic moderation was further exposed by the Guardian in 2019. This was described in detail TikTok’s review mechanisms work in tandem with Chinese government policies to suppress content that harms China’s image. For example, TikTok censors mentions of the Tiananmen incident and Tibetan independence, and adjusts its exposure algorithms to limit the spread of these topics.

To make matters worse, China itself has developed the largest strict censorship apparatus in the world Great firewall and the outright ban on foreign platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube and Instagram. Any attempt to access international networks – locally referred to as ‘jumping the wall’ – must be through official gateway channels provided by the national public telecommunications network, as prescribed by People’s Republic of China law. Neither organizations nor individuals are allowed to set up or use alternative channels for international connectivity (although many use private VPNs, these are technically illegal and subject to crackdowns).

The asymmetry is clear. While Chinese platforms like TikTok operate freely in democratic countries, platforms operated by Western entities are excluded from China’s controlled cyberspace. This inequality not only creates an uneven playing field, but also illustrates how authoritarian regimes can leverage global openness to increase their influence while insulating their own populations from external narratives.

China’s regulatory strategy

This imbalance can of course be attributed to the long-standing appeasement of China’s digital influence in open societies. But the TikTok case also reveals an inherent vulnerability within the liberal international order: the very freedoms and openness defended by democratic countries can be exploited by authoritarian actors.

Such a highly visible paradox is by no means limited to China’s approach to the global information ecosystem. Described as “institutional arbitration” by Weitseng Chen of the National University of Singapore Law School, it appears to be an established tactic through which China capitalizes on the complexity and differences in cross-border regulatory regimes to gain economic or political benefits.

Chens research into international capital marketsillustrates, for example, how Chinese companies leverage this strategy. Despite domestic shortcomings in corporate governance and financial systems, they have risen to prominence globally through the use of regulatory tools such as Rule 144A and Regulation S under US securities laws – provisions that allow foreign companies to offer securities without fully to comply with standard US regulations.

Regulating TikTok thus exposes a systemic problem with global governance, with China’s regulatory influence becoming pervasive, but on an even greater scale. And restricting TikTok isn’t just about curbing an app’s features; it is a step against the “regime of truth,” to use Foucault’s terms, that maintains the platform under Chinese ownership. Essentially it’s about an ethical choice for parrhesiathe practice of frank, principled truth-telling that is crucial to the functioning of democratic government, over propaganda.

This is not to say that the encroachment on authoritarian influence is limited to TikTok alone. Disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining Taiwan’s democratic processes and institutions appear on different platforms regardless of their ownership. Nevertheless, TikTok’s stricter regulation is not an obstacle for policymakers determined to tackle information manipulation wherever it occurs.

Perhaps most troubling for a democracy like Taiwan is that TikTok’s Chinese ownership means its overseas operations are likely to be subject to Chinese domestic policies and laws — a circumstance that could facilitate this. censorship, access to dataor political influence in line with Beijing’s agenda. This distinction lends credence to TikTok’s treatment under a different regulatory approach than other platforms.

While the result of the US efforts to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok remains insecureThe choices made today will determine the conditions under which democratic allies like Taiwan tackle the persistent issue of geopolitical rivals exploiting regulatory gaps between democratic and authoritarian regimes to expand their influence in the global digital ecosystem.