A U.S. law banning TikTok passed with significant bipartisan support, going into effect last week. TikTok poses similar concerns about Chinese data collection and content manipulation for Taiwan. One significant difference is that Taiwan is in a more vulnerable position.
Eric Hsu (許嘉元), a researcher at the Taiwanese think tank DoubleThink Lab, hypothesizes that TikTok is intentionally sending political narratives to users. The research shows that people who use Tiktok, Douyin (抖音) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書) report lower levels of satisfaction in Taiwan’s democracy and are more likely to believe U.S. skepticism narratives — narratives that paint the U.S. as weak, anti-democratic and an unreliable friend to Taiwan — compared to other online users.
Hsu doesn’t think TikTok can change people’s perceived identity as Taiwanese, but it could reduce their resistance to Chinese threats and even invasion. Most young TikTok users “think that reunification with China wouldn’t really change their quality of life,” said Hsu.
However, a ban of TikTok in Taiwan appears very unlikely. While the debate is made up of similar components to the debate in the U.S. — free speech and national security — there are a few key differences that cause the political cost of banning or even regulating TikTok to outweigh the threat it poses to national security.
But that doesn’t mean the Taiwanese government has been idle. It banned TikTok on government devices in 2019 over concerns about security. Yisuo Tzeng (曾怡碩), a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research specializing in information operations and cognitive warfare, thinks that this narrow version of a ban — one that impacts government employees at work but doesn’t intrude into their personal lives — is reflective of Taiwan’s commitment to a clear division between state and society. The line was drawn here due to an understanding “that the government should be very humble in the internet world.”
Even if the Executive Yuan wanted to regulate TikTok further, there’s a limit to what it could do without support from the legislature. In the Legislative Yuan, regulating TikTok, let alone banning it, is not popular. Following the passage of the U.S.’s TikTok ban in Congress last year, Wan-Yu Wang (王婉諭), Chairperson of the New Power Party, discussed creating a version of the TikTok ban for Taiwan. Wang told Domino Theory that these efforts stalled due to a lack of public consensus about whether TikTok poses a legitimate national security threat to Taiwan.
There are some obvious reasons to question this threat. First, TikTok has a smaller market share in Taiwan compared to the U.S. — less than 22% of people in Taiwan use the app. Second, Chinese disinformation reaches Taiwan on many different platforms, not just the Chinese-owned ones. As the most targeted country for disinformation in the world, Taiwan has developed a robust network of civil society actors to combat falsehoods.
Political dynamics also preclude the stricter regulation of TikTok in Taiwan. It is Wang’s impression that the Chinese Nationalist Party (K.M.T.) doesn’t want to regulate TikTok because it benefits from the information circulated on the app, which she says tends to feature a pro-China viewpoint, as opposed to an anti-China or Taiwanese independence viewpoint. In their study on foreign influence in Taiwan’s 2024 elections, DoubleThink Lab found evidence of foreign information manipulation on TikTok and other platforms that sought to support the K.M.T. and oppose the Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.).
However, K.M.T. lawmakers tend to express their resistance to TikTok regulation as being rooted in a desire to protect citizens’ right to free speech from government intrusion. Ju-Chun Ko (葛如鈞), a K.M.T. legislator who focuses on technology policy, said that while the national security concerns about TikTok should be monitored and discussed, in the absence of stronger evidence about the threat TikTok poses to Taiwan, banning the app would unnecessarily impinge on free speech. Ko says that renewed debate on protecting speech on social media platforms in the U.S. — due to recent developments like Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook will scale back its content moderation and Trump’s desire to “save” TikTok — shows that this issue is still being litigated even in the U.S., and Taiwan shouldn’t take any drastic measures in the meantime.
This free speech appeal is compelling to TikTok users in Taiwan. Hsu from DoubleThink Lab thinks that most of the younger generation in Taiwan have a difficult time conceptualizing the threat to Taiwan’s national security that TikTok poses. However, by restricting their online freedom without further discussion, banning TikTok would make the Taiwanese government seem like the PRC.
Relatedly, if TikTok is banned, another Chinese app will likely replace it in the future. Tzeng from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research thinks that banning successive Chinese apps would become increasingly unpopular among the public, particularly among the younger generation.
Ultimately, a TikTok ban is unlikely. The K.M.T., which currently holds the most seats in the Legislative Yuan, doesn’t want to. And while some TikTok legislation has been recently proposed by the D.P.P., there doesn’t seem to be a significant amount of motivation among the party to push back. Even when the DPP had the majority in the Legislative Yuan for eight years between 2016 and 2024, it didn’t regulate TikTok.
“I think the mainstream voice is that we manage and regulate, we watch closely without violating freedom of speech, without violating the rights [of people] to use any app they want,” said Tzeng.
Indeed, although Ko (from the K.M.T.) and Wang (from the New Power Party) disagree on whether TikTok should ultimately be banned in Taiwan, they agree that no regulation can move forward without public consensus. And both expressed their desire for a measured, incremental approach to regulating TikTok.
“I think it should be banned in Taiwan, but I think we need to communicate with our civil society, since … most of our people [don’t think the threat of TikTok is severe],” said Wang, adding that the first step is to monitor TikTok to better understand the threat.
On the other hand, Ko said, “To be or not to be, to ban or not to ban — if something is just so simple, why do we need the 113 legislators here to have a meeting? We should have smart regulation, especially in this era. That’s our wisdom. That’s our human brain … It’s kind of beyond [artificial intelligence].”
Both Ko and Wang agreed that Taiwan will also be waiting to see how the U.S. decides to regulate TikTok. “I think there will be a chance that Taiwanese will follow U.S. trends, but not blindly,” said Wang.
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