Poll: Americans divided on TikTok ban

President Joe Biden’s campaign is embracing TikTok to court younger voters ahead of the presidential elections, but U.S. adults have mixed views about whether the videosharing app should even operate in the country.

A new poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds a threeway split when it comes to banning the app, with 31% of U.S. adults saying they would favor a nationwide ban on TikTok use, while 35% say they would oppose that type of action.

An additional 31% of adults say they neither favor nor oppose a ban on the social media platform, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.

Among those who use TikTok at least daily, a national ban would likely be highly unpopular: 73% say they oppose it.

Talks of a TikTok ban reached a fever pitch in the U.S. early last year after a series of Western lawmakers, governments and regulators raised concerns that a set of Chinese laws could force the company to share user data with the country’s authoritarian government. Specific evidence of such an incident hasn’t been provided by the U.S. government or TikTok critics, who also posit the platform could be used to spread propaganda beneficial to the Chinese government’s interests or be used to bury or amplify certain topics.

TikTok has vigorously defended itself, saying in part that it has never shared data with the Chinese government and won’t do so if asked.

The poll of 1,152 adults was conducted Jan. 25-29, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.