The TikTok ban was not about TikTok

It is unusual for see your life played out on the big screen, but that’s how it feels when I look ahead TikTok Never Diesa new documentary about the classic legal drama block TikTok in the United States. I’m not in the movie, but as a China reporter, I’ve followed closely every twist involving President Donald Trump. at first he threatened banning TikTok in August 2020 until the end selling products of the program’s operations in the US in January 2026.

Directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker Hao Wu, the film is starting Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival. It covers six years in 90 minutes through the creators of TikTok whose lives were deeply affected by the future of the video app.

After former President Joe Biden signed an order in 2024 requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a US ban, the company sued the government. It also enlisted eight TikTok creators to join a similar lawsuit, putting familiar faces and names in the fray. Seeing that the drama would be a good way to make a documentary, Wu immediately reached out to all the people involved in the case, and finally decided to follow three of them: Steven King, Chloe Sexton, and Topher Townsend.

Although they were all part of the case, they are also very different from each other and represent different examples of more than 200 million Americans who use TikTok. They come from different parts of the country—Arizona, Tennessee, and Mississippi. One is a die-hard Democrat, while another is a staunch Republican, and the third just makes funny, non-political jokes. “In a way, TikTok saw us through the first round,” Wu said in an interview.

Wu’s camera was rolling at key moments, including one day in 2025 when TikTok went partially dark in the US to protest Biden’s impending ban. Viewers of the film witness the second time that the program disappeared from American users and what they did recently.

The story of the TikTok ban was long and hard. It went through many arguments and battles as it passed through Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House. The program went from being Trump’s pet issue, to a rare bilateral deal under Biden, to something that Trump strongly opposed, before becoming a trade weapon in the US-China trade war. It was exhausting to follow as a journalist, and the constant twists and turns made it impossible to tell what the whole saga meant for the US. But Wu’s writing excels at finally making sense out of madness. “As a filmmaker, my goal is to make people go back and remember what happened, and think about what it revealed,” says Wu.

The All American Legend

Wu previously worked in China’s tech industry before moonlighting as a filmmaker. His old movie, People’s Republic of Desireit was a brief look at the fastest growing Chinese company at the time, which led to the success of TikTok and short video in the US. Because of Wu’s background and expertise, I expected his film to cover the Chinese TikTok scene in detail, but it doesn’t.

Wu says he made the decision because the issue of TikTok’s ban was more American than Chinese. To be honest, the story was made up a bit because TikTok did not give Wu an opportunity during the entire production process, although he repeatedly contacted the company.