That’s weird seeing my life play out on the massive screen, but that’s how it felt when I watched it ahead of time TikTok never diesrecent documentary chronicling the dramatic legal drama surrounding TikTok’s ban in the United States. I’m not actually in this video, but as a technology reporter based in China, I closely followed every twist in this story, from the moment President Donald Trump first threatened to ban TikTok in August 2020 to the moment he brokered the sale of the app’s U.S. business in January 2026.
The film was directed by Emmy-winning documentarian Hao Wu premiere on Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival. In 90 minutes, it shows six years seen through the eyes of TikTok creators, whose lives were deeply entangled in the fate of the video application.
After former President Joe Biden signed a bill in 2024 requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a U.S. ban, the company sued the government. It also recruited eight TikTok creators to join a parallel cause, bringing recognizable faces and names into the fray. Sensing that the drama would be the perfect story arc for a documentary, Wu immediately contacted all the influential people involved in the lawsuit and ultimately decided to go after three of them: Steven King, Chloe Sexton and Topher Townsend.
While they are all on the same side in the lawsuit, they are also very different from each other and represent a diverse sample over 200 million Americans using TikTok. They come from very different parts of the country – Arizona, Tennessee and Mississippi. One is a staunch Democrat, the second is an emerging influential Republican, and the third only creates amusing, apolitical content. “In a sense, TikTok did the first round of selection for us,” Wu said in an interview.
Wu’s camera rolled at crucial moments, including one day in 2025 when TikTok briefly went murky in the U.S. to protest Biden’s imminent ban. Viewers of the video witness the exact second the app disappeared for American users and the immediate reactions of influencers.
The history of the TikTok ban has been long and winding. It has gone through countless debates and battles through Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. The app went from being Trump’s pet issue to a infrequent point of bipartisan consensus under Biden, something Trump strongly opposed before ultimately becoming a bargaining chip in the U.S.-China trade war. It was exhausting to follow as a reporter, and the constant twists and turns made it impossible to tell what the whole story meant for the United States. But Wu’s documentary finally managed to make sense of this madness. “As a filmmaker, I want people to go back to this experience and reflect on what it revealed,” Wu says.
An all-American story
Wu previously worked in China’s tech industry before moonlighting as a documentary director. His earlier film titled People’s Republic of Desiresis an intimate look at China’s then booming live-streaming industry, which preceded the success of TikTok and short-form video in the US. Given Wu’s personal and professional background, I expected his video to detail TikTok’s Chinese origins, but that didn’t happen.
Wu says he made this decision because the TikTok ban story was more American than Chinese. To be fair, the narrative was shaped in part by the fact that TikTok did not provide Wu with access throughout the production process, despite his repeated contacts with the company.