A bill that could ban TikTok in the U.S. on national security grounds is gaining steam in Congress. In a rare display of bipartisan consensus, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously to pass the bill Thursday, setting it up for a future floor vote. And President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill into law if Congress passes it.
TikTok, a video sharing app first launched in 2017, has more than 150 million users in the U.S. The possibility that one of America’s most widely used and influential social media apps could be banned would be a huge deal. There’s no precedent for it. It raises big First Amendment questions. And there’s no way to anticipate how the tens of millions of young people who use the app would react, either as consumers or as activists objecting to the quashing of a popular platform. Oh, and there’s one more wrinkle: In a bizarre turn of events, former President Donald Trump, who for years sought to ban TikTok in the U.S., has suddenly flipped on the issue and is lobbying against the bill.
In other words, there’s chaos on the horizon.
The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” introduced this week in the House by Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., calls for ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the app within about five months of the law passing or face removal from U.S. app stores. The rationale is that ByteDance’s location in China means the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok for unsavory data surveillance of Americans or manipulate algorithms to meddle in the political life of its biggest geopolitical rival. Under Chinese law, a Chinese company is obligated to turn over personal data that the Chinese government claims is relevant to its national security.
The objections to a possible ban go beyond young people being mad about losing a beloved app.
Members of both parties grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew last year to build the case for this kind of bill. (Some progressive Democrats pushed back, though, and argued that scrutiny on TikTok was sinophobic.)
TikTok is fighting back. On Thursday, the app prompted its adult users to “speak up” against the bill and directed them to their local members of Congress. It seemed to have immediate results. “Individual House offices have since received hundreds of calls from TikTok users, at times fielding upward of 20 a minute, according to eight congressional aides,” according to The Washington Post.
TikTok has a huge user base of mostly young people, and if the app is banned, it’s difficult to predict how they’ll respond over the longer term. TikTok has savvily framed its opposition to the bill as a free speech matter. If that’s the narrative that prevails among young people, then it could cause some serious indignation.
Some users see information that circulates on TikTok and other social media apps on controversial issues like the Israel-Hamas war as an alternative to establishment media; it’s conceivable that some young people upset over Israel’s brutal treatment of Gaza might perceive a ban as an attempt to suppress the spread of such stories. When asked by a reporter if he worries about the electoral effects of banning TikTok, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., said, “Well, no s---, of course.” Democrats are well aware of the power of TikTok as a platform. Biden’s campaign joined TikTok in February — where he immediately amassed hundreds of thousands of followers — in a bid to deal with his young-voters problem. A TikTok ban that he signs into law certainly wouldn’t help him with this cohort.
The objections to a possible ban go beyond young people being mad about losing a beloved app. As I discussed in a piece last year, advocates for civil liberties and a less invasive internet have argued that a TikTok ban bill might be valuable for politicians eager to boast about sticking it to Beijing, but would fail to resolve some of the very issues it claims to address. For example, even with TikTok banned, China could amass data from Americans’ online activity using data brokers. And as Evan Greer, the director at Fight for the Future, a digital rights organization, points out, all social media companies, regardless of where they’re based, need to be scrutinized for their capacity to inappropriately surveil Americans and use algorithms to influence American politics. The real solution, people in this camp argue, is not select bans but strict limitations on data that any company can collect on people online. In addition to all this, some civil liberties experts doubt a TikTok ban will survive a First Amendment challenge.
But the most imminent threat to the bill could come from none other than the previous most prominent champion of a TikTok ban in America: Mr. Trump. The former president attempted to force a TikTok sale with a ban threat using an executive order while in office, but that attempt was blocked by the courts. But on Thursday Trump suddenly announced he’d changed his mind: “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday night.
It’s a bizarre new argument. The claim about Facebook doubling its business is questionable, and it didn’t “cheat” in an election. Moreover, Trump’s 180 doesn’t make intuitive sense in light of his long-standing obsession with fearmongering about China. Nobody knows what’s caused his shocking reversal, but a week ago Trump had a meeting with an ultrawealthy hedge fund manager who has a multibillion-dollar stake in ByteDance, and could theoretically be a potential future donor. Trump is nothing if not transactional. For example, he recently backed off of criticizing the new right-wing punching bag Anheuser-Busch after its Republican lobbyist hosted a high-dollar fundraiser for him.
Perhaps Trump, seeing Biden plausibly on the brink of a policy accomplishment he long sought, wants to torpedo it so that he can pursue it himself and perhaps campaign on it, in much the same way he recently shot down a bipartisan immigration bill filled with policies he favored. It’s possible Trump’s new opposition to the bill could make some Republicans apprehensive about supporting it.
TikTok’s fate in America remains uncertain. So does a bill that seems to have substantial support from the mainstream of both parties, but faces many serious obstacles.