Last Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee met to consider a bill that would force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to either divest itself of the company financially or be forbidden from placing the product in online app stores. TikTok responded with a coordinated campaign of lobbying; users of the app were pressured to call their local congressman (with a number helpfully supplied and a button to initiate the call) and “take action now to prevent a TikTok shutdown.” Congressional phone lines were subsequently flooded with tens of thousands of distraught children wailing about their favorite toy being taken away. The Energy and Commerce Committee acted accordingly — in an exceedingly rare 50–0 vote, its members moved immediately to pass the bill out of committee, with Speaker Johnson now set to bring it to the floor for a final vote.

We applaud the bipartisan unanimity of the House committee, which refused to be intimidated by such cloddishly shabby mau-mauing, and we urge all Washington lawmakers in both the House and the Senate to pass this bill expeditiously. TikTok does not need to be shut down, but it cannot be allowed to remain in Chinese hands.

The threat posed by TikTok that should matter most to Congress in considering this legislation doesn’t fundamentally have to do with its content or the behavior of its (overwhelmingly underaged) user base. Rather, it has everything to do with the fact that, aside from its social-media function, it is spyware — spyware owned and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (as all the nation’s technological products are), farming massive amounts of highly personal information from its users (down to mapping their keystrokes on other apps). TikTok is a national-security threat; that it is an increasingly urgent one that the CCP is willing to weaponize against us is only suggested by its ability to get its user base to ferociously lobby Congress. The natural comparison to be made here is to Grindr, the gay dating app whose popularity, spyware features, and obvious blackmail potential were swiftly recognized to be an intolerable civic and national-security threat. (The app’s Chinese ownership was forced to sell it to an American company.) TikTok poses the same sort of threats, on top of having extremely aggressive spyware and data-collection features.

Some, like U.S. senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have argued against the bill on the grounds that forcing China to divest from TikTok somehow constitutes an assault on First Amendment–protected speech. This argument is wildly confused, to the point of non-responsiveness. Legislators do not seek to police the speech of TikTok; they seek only to force its sale to a neutral third party. TikTok users can and will be allowed to carry on as they always have, so long as the platform remains out of the control of an avowedly hostile rival superpower.

Instead, those like Senator Paul or former president Trump, who object to the Chinese being forced to divest from TikTok, need to explain why it is so particularly important that the Chinese Communist Party be allowed to directly control and access a vast stockpile of surreptitiously gathered data on millions of American citizens at its own whims, whilst also tracking their every move on their phones. Let TikTok continue to be whatever it wishes — but not so long as it is owned and operated on behalf of Xi Jinping.