5 ways TikTok has tried to appease regulators—and why it has hasn’t worked

Social media platforms and content apps change all the time. But in the past few years, TikTok has changed more than many.

As the company has faced criticism from regulators around the world because of its alleged links to China, it has sought to appease its critics by reshaping the app, its company, and how it works.

It’s all for nothing, it seems, as politicians in the U.S. are pushing to force TikTok to divest itself from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. That hard-line approach is supported by a majority of American citizens, according to a new poll by Morning Consult and Bloomberg published earlier this week.

“TikTok basically adopted all of the mitigation measures that had been used earlier and offered new ones such as a kill switch,” says Anupam Chander, professor of law and technology at Georgetown University. “But it was an impossible task, as the government was not prepared for anything other than a sale or a ban.”

A spokesperson for TikTok says the company has gone far beyond what its competitors have done to safeguard users’ data. “We simply asked to be judged on facts and evidence, not baseless fears, and treated equally to our competitors,” the spokesperson adds.

Here is a list of the ways that the company has tried to reshape how it works to appease the skeptics.

The kill switch

As part of a lawsuit filed by TikTok in response to the ban, the company’s lawyers say they proposed a plan to give the U.S. a “shut-down option” that would allow the government to suspend TikTok’s operations immediately in the country if it didn’t meet data security standards. 

Project Texas (and Project Clover)

TikTok has spent $1.5 billion on Project Texas, which involves siloing U.S. data on Oracle-operated data servers in Texas. (A parallel approach, called Project Clover, is happening in Europe.) The company has called Project Texas “unprecedented” in its scope—although a Fortune investigation alleged that the project was “largely cosmetic.”

Third-party oversight

Alongside the work in the Texas and Clover projects, TikTok has contracted with third-party security providers who regularly monitor the app’s traffic and data management. In Europe, the third-party company is able to report any issues it finds independently directly to the government, without any TikTok involvement. Overall, the company says it has spent more than $2 billion to “resolve the very concerns publicly expressed by congressional supporters of the Act” to ban it, the company said in court documents.

$1 million to socially driven creators

One of the strongest defenses TikTok has made for its continued existence is its economic impact on small businesses across the U.S.—as well as individual creators. And the company is keen to promote that, including bankrolling the $1 million Change Makers Program, which supports 50 “purpose driven” creators around the world and donates $25,000 to a nonprofit of each of the 50 creators’ choice.

Stronger rules on state-sponsored media

Conscious of the impact of its app on the large number of elections this year, TikTok announced on Thursday that it was ramping up its work to prevent covert operations from state-sponsored entities. When the app identifies profiles linked to state-affiliated media outlets, TikTok will block access to the “For You” page for users outside the country in which the outlet is based. 

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