The TikTok Ban Was Never About TikTok

TikTok 禁令从来就不是为了 TikTok

It’s strange to see your life playing out on the big screen, but that’s what it felt like when I got an advanced look at TikTok Never Dies, a new documentary chronicling the high-stakes legal drama around banning TikTok in the United States. I’m not actually in the film, but as a China tech reporter, I’ve closely followed every twist and turn of the saga it covers, from when President Donald Trump first threatened to block TikTok in August 2020 to when he ended up brokering a sale of the app’s US operations in January 2026.

看到自己经历过的人生在银幕上重现，这种感觉很奇妙。当我提前观看新纪录片《TikTok 永不消逝》（TikTok Never Dies）时，就是这种感觉。这部纪录片记录了围绕美国封禁 TikTok 的高风险法律博弈。虽然我本人并未出镜，但作为一名中国科技记者，我密切关注了该事件的每一个转折——从唐纳德·特朗普总统 2020 年 8 月首次威胁封禁 TikTok，到他最终在 2026 年 1 月促成该应用美国业务的出售。

Directed by Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Hao Wu, the film is premiering on Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival. It captures six years in 90 minutes through the eyes of the TikTok creators whose lives were deeply entangled with the fate of the video app.

该片由艾美奖获奖纪录片导演吴皓执导，于周四在翠贝卡电影节首映。影片在 90 分钟内，通过那些生活与这款视频应用命运紧密相连的 TikTok 创作者的视角，捕捉了这六年的历程。

After former President Joe Biden signed a law in 2024 requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a US ban, the company sued the government. It also recruited eight TikTok creators to join a parallel case, putting recognizable faces and names to the battle. Sensing that the drama would be a perfect plot line for a documentary, Wu immediately reached out to all the influencers involved in the lawsuit, eventually deciding to follow three of them: Steven King, Chloe Sexton, and Topher Townsend.

2024 年，前总统乔·拜登签署法律，要求字节跳动出售 TikTok，否则将面临美国禁令，该公司随后起诉了政府。同时，公司还招募了八位 TikTok 创作者加入平行诉讼，让这场博弈有了具体的面孔和名字。吴皓敏锐地察觉到这段戏剧性的过程是纪录片的绝佳素材，立即联系了所有参与诉讼的网红，最终决定跟踪拍摄其中三人：Steven King、Chloe Sexton 和 Topher Townsend。

While they were all on the same side of the lawsuit, they are also quite different from each other and represent a diverse sample of the more than 200 millions Americans who use TikTok. They are from vastly different parts of the country—Arizona, Tennessee, and Mississippi. One is a hard-core Democrat, while another is a rising Republican influencer, and the third only makes funny, non-political content. “In some way, TikTok did the first round of screening for us,” Wu said in an interview.

尽管他们站在诉讼的同一阵线，但彼此之间差异巨大，代表了全美两亿多 TikTok 用户中多元化的群体。他们来自美国截然不同的地区——亚利桑那州、田纳西州和密西西比州。其中一人是坚定的民主党支持者，另一人是共和党阵营中冉冉升起的网红，第三人则只制作搞笑的非政治内容。吴皓在采访中说：“在某种程度上，TikTok 已经为我们完成了第一轮筛选。”

Wu’s camera was rolling during important moments, including the one day in 2025 when TikTok briefly went dark in the US to protest Biden’s imminent ban. Viewers of the film witness the exact second when the app disappeared for American users and the immediate reactions of the influencers.

吴皓的镜头记录下了许多重要时刻，包括 2025 年 TikTok 为抗议拜登即将实施的禁令而在美国短暂“断网”的那一天。观众在片中可以亲眼目睹该应用对美国用户消失的那一瞬间，以及网红们的第一反应。

The story of the TikTok ban was long and winding. It went through countless debates and battles when it passed through Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House. The app went from being Trump’s pet issue, to a rare point of bipartisan consensus under Biden, to something Trump strongly opposed, before eventually becoming a bargaining chip in the US-China trade war. It was exhausting to follow it back then as a reporter, and the constant twists made it impossible to conclude what this whole saga meant for the US. But Wu’s documentary succeeds in finally making some sense out of the madness. “As a filmmaker, my intention is to make people go back and relive that experience, and think about what that experience revealed,” Wu says.

TikTok 禁令的故事漫长而曲折。它在国会、最高法院和白宫经历了无数次的辩论与博弈。这款应用从特朗普的“心头大患”，变成拜登任内两党罕见的共识，再到特朗普强烈反对的对象，最终成为中美贸易战中的筹码。作为记者，当时追踪这一事件令人精疲力竭，不断的转折让人无法断定这场闹剧对美国意味着什么。但吴皓的纪录片成功地从混乱中理出了头绪。吴皓说：“作为电影制作人，我的初衷是让人们回顾并重温那段经历，思考那段经历揭示了什么。”

An All-American Tale

一个纯粹的美国故事

Wu previously worked in China’s tech industry before he began moonlighting as a documentary filmmaker. His earlier movie, People’s Republic of Desire, was an intimate look at China’s then-booming livestreaming industry, which predated the success of TikTok and short-form video in the US. Because of Wu’s personal and professional background, I expected his film to discuss TikTok’s Chinese origins in detail, but it doesn’t.

吴皓在转型成为纪录片导演之前，曾在中国科技行业工作。他早期的作品《虚你人生》（People’s Republic of Desire）深入探讨了当时中国蓬勃发展的直播行业，这比 TikTok 和短视频在美国的成功要早得多。由于吴皓的个人和职业背景，我原以为他的电影会详细讨论 TikTok 的中国血统，但事实并非如此。

Wu says he made that decision because the story about the TikTok ban was more American than it is Chinese. To be fair, the narrative was shaped partially by the fact that TikTok didn’t give Wu access throughout the production process, despite his repeated outreach to the company.

吴皓表示，他之所以做出这个决定，是因为 TikTok 禁令的故事本质上更像是一个美国故事，而非中国故事。平心而论，这种叙事方式在一定程度上也受到现实因素的影响：尽管吴皓多次尝试联系，但 TikTok 在整个制作过程中并未给予他拍摄权限。

“The film becomes how Americans, different types of Americans, argue with each other over this issue. It’s really not about what TikTok did or didn’t do. It’s about what Americans perceive TikTok to have done or haven’t done,” Wu says.

“这部电影最终呈现的是美国人——不同类型的美国人——如何就这个问题争论不休。它真的不是关于 TikTok 做了什么或没做什么，而是关于美国人认为 TikTok 做了什么或没做什么，”吴皓说。

Even though TikTok’s Chinese ownership made it a political pariah in the first place, the US government never actually tried to prove in court that the app posed any concrete harm. The courts appeared to care far more about balancing the right to free speech with protecting national security. In many ways, TikTok became merely a vehicle (a very good one) for different groups in the US to project their anxieties about social media, child safety, disinformation, and extremism.

尽管 TikTok 的中国所有权使其最初就成为了政治上的“贱民”，但美国政府从未在法庭上真正证明该应用造成了任何具体的伤害。法院似乎更关心如何在言论自由权与国家安全保护之间取得平衡。在许多方面，TikTok 仅仅成为了美国不同群体投射其对社交媒体、儿童安全、虚假信息和极端主义焦虑的载体（而且是一个非常好的载体）。

When Politics Trumps Truth

当政治凌驾于真相之上

When Wu decided to make his TikTok documentary, he says he expected it to be another nerdy discussion of legal principles—much like one of his previous films about the Supreme Court case involving Harvard and affirmative action. But after the Supreme Court part of the TikTok story wrapped up, Wu explains, “I began to think about, what’s the story now? Why did Trump try so hard to save TikTok and sacrifice some of his political capital and anger some of his Republican allies in the process?”

当吴皓决定拍摄这部 TikTok 纪录片时，他说自己原以为这会是另一场关于法律原则的枯燥讨论——就像他之前关于哈佛大学平权行动最高法院案件的电影一样。但随着 TikTok 事件中最高法院部分的结束，吴皓解释道：“我开始思考，现在的故事是什么？为什么特朗普要如此努力地拯救 TikTok，甚至不惜牺牲自己的政治资本，并在此过程中激怒他的一些共和党盟友？”

Sexton, one of the protagonists of the film, was asking similar questions. She built a following by talking about her experiences being raised by a single mom and getting fired from her job while pregnant. After she fought tooth and nail to keep TikTok in the US, it seemed like the most powerful force on her side turned out to be Trump, a politician she vehemently opposes. At the end of the documentary, Sexton sounds nihilistic about the fight and questions whether the only thing that mattered in the end was Washington politics.

影片主角之一 Sexton 也在问同样的问题。她通过讲述自己由单亲妈妈抚养长大以及怀孕期间被解雇的经历积累了粉丝。在她拼尽全力试图让 TikTok 留在美国后，她发现支持她这一方的最强大力量竟然是特朗普——一位她强烈反对的政治人物。在纪录片结尾，Sexton 对这场斗争感到虚无，并质疑最终唯一重要的东西是否只是华盛顿的政治博弈。

Wu says that including Chloe’s change of heart was a deliberate choice. “I think I would like to use those words to convey my warning to people who are so gung-ho in championing social media regulation. A lot of the decisions behind those are motivated by either money concerns, power concerns, or political concerns,” he says. “I want people to really think about how we still want to hold up the ideal of freedom of speech online or the marketplace of ideas. In some ways, I feel like through all this debate, we are letting go of those ideals. But that happened so gradually.”

吴皓表示，将 Chloe 的心态转变包含在内是一个深思熟虑的选择。“我想用这些话向那些热衷于支持社交媒体监管的人传达我的警告。这些决策背后的许多动机，要么是出于金钱考量，要么是权力考量，要么是政治考量，”他说。“我希望人们真正思考我们如何才能继续坚持网络言论自由或思想市场的理想。在某种程度上，我觉得通过这场辩论，我们正在放弃这些理想。但这一切发生得太缓慢了。”