Linguopragmatic Representation of US Digital Policy Contradictions in Political Media Discourse: The Case of TikTok during the Biden Administration

The subject of this study is the linguistic and compositional-pragmatic means through which contradictions in U.S. policy toward TikTok during the administration of Joe Biden are represented in American news media discourse. The object of the research is English-language news discourse devoted to the governmental regulation of the platform, its use in electoral communication, and the subsequent judicial review of the adopted decisions. The article examines the measures aimed at regulating Tiktok, evaluative vocabulary, adversative and concessive constructions, forms of speech attribution, and the compositional organization of headlines, leads, and quotations. Particular attention is paid to the linguistic distinction between the Biden administration and his election campaign as independent discursive actors. The material consists of 13 news and analytical publications issued by Reuters, the Associated Press, and Politico between February 2024 and January 2025. The selected publications cover the Biden campaign’s entry into TikTok, the adoption of legislation requiring the divestiture of the platform from ByteDance, and the subsequent judicial review of this decision. The research methodology includes linguopragmatic, lexical-semantic, and contextual analysis. As an additional technique, publications devoted to the same news events are compared with. The scientific novelty of the study lies in identifying a linguopragmatic model of the dual representation of TikTok in American political media discourse. The platform is shown to be constructed simultaneously as an object of foreign corporate control and a potential threat to national security, and as an important space for political information, electoral mobilization, and communication with younger audiences. The study concludes that this duality is formed at three interconnected levels. At the referential level, discourse shifts between TikTok as a social media platform and ByteDance as its foreign owner. At the institutional level, the administration, the election campaign, legislative bodies, judicial institutions, and company representatives are differentiated. At the interpretive level, the model of preventive national security protection competes with the model of protecting freedom of digital communication. The analysis demonstrates that the contradiction is reproduced not through direct journalistic evaluation, but through competing nominations, syntactic juxtaposition of actions, the choice of speech-attribution verbs, and the polyphonic organization of quotations. The findings contribute to a more precise understanding of the linguistic construction of digital policy in professional news discourse and may be applied in further research in political linguistics, media discourse, and digital communication.