It's gone from trench warfare to blitzkrieg. After two years of interminable attempts to ban TikTok in the United States, the House of Representatives launched an extremely swift attack, which led on Wednesday, March 13, to a vote that could lead to forcing ByteDance, owner of the app, to sell. The bill passed in the House by an overwhelming 352 votes to 65, and heads now to the Senate.
The bill gives TikTok's owner six months to sell the app to a non-Chinese operator, failing which it will be banned from the Apple App Store and Google Play.
The deal was closed in eight days, after the bill was introduced on March 5 by two representatives, Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi. Gallagher welcomed a vote that "forces TikTok to break with the CCP [the Chinese Communist Party]," adding, "This is a common-sense measure to protect our national security."
The attack caught TikTok off guard. The company had thought the offensive was contained. It denounced a "secret" procedure. "Make your voices heard," the company's CEO Shou Zi Chew said in posts on X and TikTok
But the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, had rekindled attacks on the app used by 170 million Americans, due to the flood of videos deemed pro-Palestinian on the social medium. President Joe Biden said he would sign the bill if it reached his desk at the White House.
"Do we want TikTok, as a platform, to be owned by an American company or owned by China? Do we want the data from TikTok - children's data, adults' data - to be going, to be staying here in America or going to China?" asked National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
House Republicans have defied the advice of Donald Trump, who said on March 7 that he was in favor of the social medium he prefers to Facebook, which he was temporarily banned from in the wake of the assault on the Capitol, on January 6, 2021. "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!"
Members of Congress are gripped by a surge of anti-Chinese sentiment, with a hint of McCarthyism, as seen during the hearing of TikTok CEO Chew on March 23, 2023.
Like last year, the emblem of the radical left, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had expressed her opposition before the vote. "I'm voting NO on the TikTok forced sale bill," Ocasio-Cortez said in a post on X. "This bill was incredibly rushed, from committee to vote in four days, with little explanation. There are serious antitrust and privacy questions here, and any national security concerns should be laid out to the public prior to a vote."
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