WASHINGTON – It’s been described as “digital fentanyl” by a United States lawmaker, but social media app TikTok’s rising influence on America’s young voters could be a game changer in the next election.

Several states, and many in Congress and the White House, want the video-hosting service owned by Chinese company ByteDance banned or sold to an American buyer. Among the most-cited concerns are its possible use as spyware by the Chinese government, misinformation and its social impact on young people.

As at June, federal employees and state employees in 34 out of 50 states were prohibited from using it on government devices.

But in some cases, the courts have stalled these efforts. On Nov 30, a federal judge blocked a law in Montana that sought to ban TikTok across the state from Jan 1, 2024, saying the ban “oversteps state power”.

US District Judge Donald Molloy said there was also “little doubt that Montana’s legislature and Attorney-General were more interested in targeting China’s ostensible role in TikTok than with protecting consumers in Montana”.

A day earlier, a judge in Indiana similarly rejected an attempt by the state to ban TikTok on grounds that it constitutes a “malicious and menacing threat unleashed on unsuspecting Indiana consumers by a Chinese company that knows full well the harms it inflicts on users”.

Meanwhile, politicians are facing a deepening dilemma ahead of the presidential election in 2024. Given that more young voters are turning to the app not just for entertainment but also for news, should they, too, be on it even if they may loathe it?

One contender for the White House, the fast-talking millennial Vivek Ramsawamy, 38, a wild card for the Republican nomination, has embraced it.

“We’re in this to reach young people, to energise young people, and to do that, we can’t just hide,” he said in his first post in September. “You can’t play in the game, and then not play in the game.”

But since June, US government agencies and employees have been prohibited from being on the platform, and that could well be hampering President Joe Biden’s ability to get his messaging, especially on the economy, out to a cohort that traditionally leans towards Democrats – young voters.

The presumptive Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, is also not on TikTok. But the right wing, analysts say, is finding fertile ground on the anarchical platform where conspiracy competes with fact.

“There is plenty of research that shows that people who lean right politically are drawn more frequently to misinformation and to news sources that traffic in misinformation,” says Mr Paul Barrett, adjunct professor at New York University’s School of Law and deputy director at its Stern Centre for Business and Human Rights.

The Biden administration has handcuffed itself, the adjunct professor said.

“There’s no doubt that... teenagers and people in their early 20s prefer TikTok over the older, more familiar platforms, and there’s no doubt that political forces of all sorts have discovered TikTok as a medium,” he told The Straits Times.

“I don’t think that the election is going to turn on who can perform best on TikTok, but at the margin with a crucial segment of the electorate, which is to say younger voters, it could be a factor.”

Voters between the ages of 18 and 24 are estimated to comprise about 28 per cent of the electorate – and achieving turnout is always a challenge.

Certainly, the bans do not prevent political messaging through influencers like Mr Harry Sisson, who filmed a TikTok video in November 2022 with former president Barack Obama. Mr Sisson, who goes by the TikTok handle harryjsisson, has 746,800 followers and a cumulative 87.5 million “likes”.

But how the platform may influence voting behaviour is a question in search of an answer, partly because the social impact of video messaging is much harder to measure than that of text.

Its effect, though, was dramatically illustrated in November when a long-forgotten “Letter to America” by Osama bin Laden – the mastermind behind the Sept 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,977 people – surfaced on the platform and, according to researchers, garnered more than 6.9 million views. It subsequently went viral on other platforms as well.

The letter stated, among other things, that the Sept 11 attacks were blowback for America’s support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine territory. 

Osama was killed by US forces in an operation in Pakistan in 2011.

Also in November, Pew Research said its polling showed that a small but growing share of US adults regularly get news on TikTok.

“In just three years, the share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3 per cent in 2020 to 14 per cent in 2023,” Pew Research said on Nov 15.

A separate NBC News poll reported on Nov 22 found that one in five voters uses the app at least once a day – and that a higher share of young voters say they regularly use TikTok.

This has triggered more scrutiny for the app, whose Singaporean chief executive Chew Shou Zi was cross-questioned for more than four hours in Congress in March.

The US House China Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher has labelled the app “digital fentanyl”, referring to its addictive qualities.

In his opening remarks at a Nov 30 hearing in Congress on China’s strategy to shape the global information space, the Republican from Wisconsin said: “In the best-case scenario, TikTok is CCP (Chinese Communist Party) spyware... In the worst-case scenario, TikTok is perhaps the largest-scale malign influence operation ever conducted.”

Dr Colin Clarke, director of research at The Soufan Group, who focuses on domestic and transnational terrorism, international security and geopolitics, told ST the Osama letter going viral on TikTok was fundamentally a failure of the US education system.

“The US authorities have mostly been focused on the impact of radicalisation, but what we saw with the bin Laden letter, although less dangerous, is potentially more corrosive over the long term,” Dr Clarke wrote in an e-mail.

“Moreover, there is no bipartisan agreement for what to do about TikTok, and politicians seem concerned about restricting the app during an election year, for fear of alienating Gen Z and younger demographics that are now of voting age or will be soon.”

TikTok is “very sinister”, said war historian and strategist Edward Luttwak, who views the app as a Trojan horse. Congressman Gallagher understands this, he said.

“The remedy here is not to use TikTok,” Dr Luttwak told ST. “The remedy is to shut it down as a Chinese-operated political warfare machine.”

But attempts to shut it down have also met with resistance from an army of powerful lobbyists, he noted.

In July, the journal Open Secrets, which follows money trails, reported that after ByteDance spent a record US$5.3 million (S$7.1 million) on federal lobbying in 2022, it poured another US$4.28 million into federal lobbying during the first half of 2023.

In total, ByteDance has spent more than US$17.7 million on lobbying since it first reported payments to federal lobbyists in 2019.

Former members of Congress are among the lobbyists; they include former senators Trent Lott of Mississippi and John Breaux of Louisiana, as well as former congressmen Jeff Denham of California and Bart Gordon of Tennessee.

Concerns over TikTok handing user data to China have been partially addressed by ByteDance – though lawmakers are not convinced.

Worries about the incendiary effect TikTok may have on politics in a deeply divided country, with the social media space flooded with misinformation and disinformation, are mounting.

The algorithmic push of disinformation will be a fundamental threat to the US elections, said Dr Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a geopolitical consultancy firm.

“Radicalisation on TikTok and YouTube, fakes across the board, (X owner) Elon Musk pushing engagement with active proponents of hatred... (are) the biggest issues threatening to derail legitimate transfer of power in the US, in my view,” he said.