TikTok has never been related to TikTok

It's strange watching your life play out on the big screen, but that's how I felt when I took an in-depth look at TikTok Never Dies, a new documentary chronicling the high-stakes legal drama surrounding TikTok's ban in the United States. I'm not actually in the film, but as a Chinese tech journalist, I've closely followed every twist and turn in the saga it covers, from when President Donald Trump first threatened to block TikTok in August 2020 to when he ended up negotiating the sale of the app's U.S. operations in January 2026.

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

After former President Joe Biden signed a law in 2024 requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a U.S. ban, the company took the government to court. He also recruited eight TikTok creators to join a side affair, putting recognizable faces and names into the battle. Sensing that the drama would make a perfect plot for a documentary, Wu immediately contacted all the influencers involved in the trial, ultimately deciding to follow three of them: Steven King, Chloe Sexton and Topher Townsend.

Even though they were all on the same side in the lawsuit, they are also quite different from each other and represent a diverse sample of the more than 200 million Americans who use TikTok. They come from very different parts of the country: Arizona, Tennessee and Mississippi. One is a die-hard Democrat, while another is a rising Republican influencer, and the third only posts fun, apolitical content. “In a way, TikTok made the first round of selections for us,” Wu said in an interview.

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

The history of the TikTok ban was long and winding. It was the subject of countless debates and battles as it passed Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. The app went from being a Trump favorite to a rare bipartisan consensus under Biden, then to something Trump strongly opposed, before finally becoming a bargaining chip in the U.S.-China trade war. It was exhausting to follow him as a journalist, and the constant twists and turns made it impossible to conclude what this whole saga meant for the United States. But Wu's documentary finally succeeds in making sense of this madness. “As a filmmaker, my intention is to make people come back and relive that experience and think about what that experience revealed,” Wu says.

An All-American Tale

Wu previously worked in China's tech industry before he began moonlighting as a documentary filmmaker. His previous film, People’s Republic of Desire, was an intimate look at China’s then-burgeoning live-streaming industry, which predated the success of TikTok and short-form video in the United States. Due to Wu's personal and professional background, I expected his film to discuss TikTok's Chinese origins in detail, but that's not the case.

Wu says he made this decision because the story of the TikTok ban was more American than Chinese. To be fair, the narrative was shaped in part by TikTok not giving Wu access throughout the production process, despite his repeated contact with the company.

"The film shows how Americans, different kinds of Americans, argue 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 hasn't done," Wu says.

Even though TikTok's Chinese ownership has made it a political pariah, the U.S. government has never actually attempted to prove in court that the app poses concrete harm. The courts seemed far more concerned with balancing the right to free speech and protecting national security. In many ways, TikTok has become simply a (very effective) way for different groups in the United States to express concerns about social media, child safety, misinformation, and extremism.

When politics trumps truth

When Wu decided to make his TikTok documentary, he said he expected it to be another cheesy discussion about legal principles, much like one of his previous films about the Supreme Court case involving Harvard and affirmative action. But after the Supreme Court portion of TikTok's story ended, Wu explains, "I started thinking, 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?"

Sexton, one of the film's protagonists, had similar questions. She built a following speaking about her experiences being raised by a single mother and being fired from her job while pregnant. After fighting tooth and nail to keep TikTok in the United States, it seemed like the most powerful force on her side turned out to be Trump, a politician she vehemently opposes. By the end of the documentary, Sexton seems nihilistic about the fight and wonders if the only thing that ultimately mattered was Washington's policies.

Wu says Chloe's change of heart was a deliberate choice. "I think I'd like to use these words to convey my warning to the people who are so enthusiastic about defending social media regulation. Many of the decisions behind them are driven either by financial concerns, or power concerns, or political concerns," he says. "I want people to really think about how we still want to uphold the ideal of free speech online or the marketplace of ideas. In some ways, I feel like through all this debate, we're abandoning those ideals. But it's happened so gradually."

This is an edition of the Made in China newsletter by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis. Read previous newsletters here.