TikTok’s Identity Crisis: Corporate Personality in a De-Globalizing World
TikTok’s Identity Crisis: Corporate Personality in a De-Globalizing World
The TikTok ban case exposes a new reality: Contrary to widespread predictions that globalization would lead to the statelessness of large corporations, weaponized interdependence has heightened the salience of questions about corporate identity and control, as well as informal channels of state influence over commercial enterprises. TikTok’s identity crisis reveals the limitations of standard corporate law doctrines in satisfying policymakers focused on national security and geopolitical rivalry.
This post was originally published by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.
TikTok’s travails under the Trump and Biden Administrations are typically portrayed as a clash between national security interests and First Amendment protections. This tension is the focus of TikTok’s suit against the U.S. Government over a 2024 law that subjects the video platform to a ban in the United States unless it is divested from Chinese control by January 19, 2025.
But TikTok’s problems in the United States expose another serious tension: between longstanding legal doctrines of corporate identity and separate personality, on one hand, and increasing concerns over Beijing’s use of erstwhile private commercial firms as instruments of state influence, on the other. The divest-or-ban legislation illustrates that corporate law’s answers to the question of corporate identity and separateness are not definitive in a de-globalizing world.
Continue reading the post here.
