The House is set to vote Wednesday on a bill that would require ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to sell the app or face a ban on U.S. devices.
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The House is set to vote Wednesday on a bill that would require ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to sell the app or face a ban on U.S. devices.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The House of Representatives is on track to approve legislation Wednesday that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the company, or face a ban of the popular social media app in the U.S.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., who chairs the House Select committee on China and is the lead GOP sponsor of the bipartisan bill, maintains the bill does not amount to a ban of the video sharing app.
“What we’re after is, it’s not a ban, it’s a forced separation,” Gallagher told NPR. “The TikTok user experience can continue and improve so long as ByteDance doesn’t own the company.”
Gallagher says classified and unclassified national security assessments show that the app is a threat to user privacy, that it’s been used to target journalists and interfere in elections. Top officials from intelligence and national security agencies conducted a classified briefing on their analysis for all House members on Tuesday.
The bipartisan measure was unanimously approved last week by the House Energy and Commerce committee. It’s coming to the floor Wednesday under a process that requires two-thirds of the House to pass.
The bill is expected to pass but its fate is unclear in the Senate where some lawmakers have said they would like to hold hearings and consider it further.
Lobbying campaign flooded offices on Capitol Hill with calls
Gallagher says the lobbying campaign that TikTok launched — with push notices using location information to connect users by phone to their member of Congress — proves why the bill is needed.
“You had member offices being deluged with calls, you know, teenagers crying and one threatening suicide and one impersonating one of my colleague’s sons,” he said. “That, to me demonstrates how the platform could be weaponized in the future.”
The bipartisan bill, dubbed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” blocks any app store or webhosting services in the U.S. for ByteDance-controlled applications, including TikTok, unless the app severs ties to ByteDance, under a designation that it’s subject to the control of a foreign adversary. The bill gives ByteDance up to six months to divest, and if it doesn’t do that it would no longer be available in app stores in the U.S.
The bill also sets up a process for the president to address any future threats from any foreign owned apps if they are deemed a national security risk. It also creates a system for users to download their own data and switch to an alternate platform.
Opponents cite freedom of speech and economic impact of a ban
Florida Democratic Congressman Maxwell Frost is the youngest member of Congress, and he opposes the bill.
“I think that it is a violation of people’s First Amendment rights,” He said. “TikTok is a place for people to express ideas. I have many small businesses in my district and content creators in my district, and I think it’s going to drastically impact them too.”
He and other opponents say the bill is being rushed through and many lawmakers don’t grasp the impact it could have.
TikTok declined an interview with NPR. In a statement a spokesperson said “The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression. This will damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience, and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country.”
Illinois Democrat, Raj Krishnamoorthi, is the ranking Democrat on the House Select committee on China and helped write the bill. He pushed back on the company’s argument, telling NPR, “There’s no first amendment right to espionage, there’s no first amendment right to harm our national security.”
The company stresses that it has invested its own money to set up a firewall in an effort dubbed “Project Texas” to address data privacy concerns and keep users’ data in the U.S.
But Krishnamoorthi says he and other lawmakers reviewed the efforts and says the company’s claims about their safeguards were false. “Whether it was Tiktok saying that ‘oh American user data is not going to be accessible to anyone in China.’ Again, wrong. That was also proven false. And then they said that American user data is not going to be used to target anybody again. Wrong. That was false.”
Even opponents of the bill expect it will easily clear the House, so TikTok is focused on blocking action in the Senate. According to a source familiar with effort, CEO Shou Zi Chew was in Washington this week and on Capitol Hill to discuss the bill with lawmakers.
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley backs the House bill. He says he’s frustrated that Congress has failed to move tech legislation and argues TikTok is different from other apps. “The really only reason to ban it – it is a major national security concern — and that makes it very different from Google and Meta and the other who do all kinds of bad stuff but they are not effective subsidiaries of a hostile foreign government.”
Presidential campaign politics could impact path for bill
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, proposed a ban back in 2020 when he was in the White House. But he does not support the House bill.
When he served as president he vowed to ban the social media app. Trump explained his new opposition in an interview with CNBC on Monday, saying that despite his the possible security risk, he opposed a ban because it meant users would move to another platform that he considered more dangerous.
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media,” he said.
President Biden’s campaign posts regularly on TikTok, but the White House has said if a bill is sent to his desk he’ll sign it.
If a law is enacted the fight might not end there: TikTok has mounted legal challenges against other efforts to ban the app, and courts have sided with their argument that blocking TikTok violates users’ First Amendment rights.
NPR’s Claudia Grisales contributed to this report
This story originally appeared on NPR
