Securitizing digital platforms: TikTok, algorithmic governance, and the construction of national security threats in the United States

This article examines how commercial digital platforms become framed as national security threats in contemporary policy environments. Focusing on the U.S. regulation of TikTok, it analyzes how a widely used social media platform was transformed into an object of exceptional governance requiring qualified divestiture or potential exclusion. The study draws on a multi-source corpus, including congressional hearings, executive orders, legislative texts, judicial rulings, and a purposive quota sample of 120 elite-media publication records, drawn from an eligible press corpus covering August 2020 to January 2025. It identifies a three-phase trajectory: initial executive framing; policy recalibration and congressional amplification; and legislative codification followed by judicial ratification and contingent enforcement. Through this trajectory, security narratives were constructed, institutionalized, and made legally actionable. The findings advance understanding of platform governance by identifying a mechanism of structural securitization, in which threat claims rely not on demonstrated harm but on the perceived possibility of harm rooted in ownership structure, legal jurisdiction, and algorithmic opacity. In this process, limited auditability enables worst-case reasoning, while geopolitical context allows foreign ownership to be treated as a sufficient basis for risk attribution. The article shows how security narratives, domestic political incentives, and techno-nationalist competition contributed to the institutionalization of divestiture or exclusion as a legitimate policy response.