The House will vote Wednesday on a bill that would force TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the video-sharing social-media platform or be banned on app stores and other internet services in the United States.
Wednesday’s floor vote comes amid an intense lobbying campaign from TikTok, whose CEO is on the Hill this week urging members to oppose the bill authored by some of Capitol Hill’s biggest China hawks, including House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party chairman Mike Gallagher (R., Wisc.) and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.). Both lawmakers have spent years sounding the alarm over ByteDance’s data-collection capabilities and ties to the CCP. Just this week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report warning that TikTok may use generative artificial intelligence to influence U.S. elections this cycle.
Even if the TikTok divestiture bill — the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” — passes the House by the requisite two-thirds vote, it’s likely to face bipartisan pushback in the Senate, where some critics of the bill argue that the legislation paves the way for over-regulation of private businesses, raises free-speech concerns, or is too narrow in targeting only one app.
Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) has led the charge against the legislation in the upper chamber, arguing that it would violate the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s owners and users.
“In a free country you don’t take people’s companies,” Paul said in a statement to USA Today. “I think it also violates the First Amendment rights of 180 million Americans who use it so I’m absolutely opposed to it.”
The bill is also facing opposition from the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee Donald Trump — who came out against the bill after he met with wealthy Republican donor Jeff Yass, who owns a multibillion-dollar stake in ByteDance. The former president has denied that his meeting with Yass influenced his position on the bill, telling CNBC on Monday that young people would go “crazy” without TikTok and that banning the app would help Facebook, which he views as “an enemy of the people.”
Trump’s opposition to the bill comes after his own administration issued an executive order in 2020 ordering TikTok to sell ByteDance’s share of the company to a U.S. company.
But proponents of the legislation say that the national-security risks of ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese government outweigh those political concerns. “There is no private sector separate from military applications — any business is subservient to the Chinese Communist Party,” said GOP representative John Moolenaar of Michigan, a member of the House’s China Select Committee.
Special interest groups’ lobbying efforts for and against the bill have some Republican members on the fence about how they’ll vote. The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group, hired ex-Trump aide Kellyanne Conway to lobby lawmakers to vote against the bill, whereas the lobbying arms of other conservative groups — the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity — are urging members to support it.
Asked in a brief interview Monday evening whether he has had any recent conversations about the bill with TikTok lobbyists or the Club for Growth, GOP representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee said: “I think Heritage is for it and — oh wait, one of them is for it, the other one’s against it. And I think Trump’s made a comment. So again: to be determined.”
“We’re looking at it, I mean, I can argue it both ways,” Ogles added.
TikTok has spent millions of dollars lobbying against the bill and sent popups last week urging users to call their representatives to oppose the bill — a lobbying effort that may have only backfired, given that the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s 50-member body voted unanimously on March 7 to advance the bill to a floor vote.
One GOP lawmaker, Ashley Hinson of Iowa, took it upon herself to take those phone calls herself. “I kind of went into mom mode and started explaining it like I would to my own 13-year-old, then most of them said: ‘Oh, thank you. I had no idea. That’s what that was actually designed to do,’” Hinson, a member of the China Select Committee, told NR in a brief interview earlier this week.
President Biden has said he would sign the bill if it came to his desk, even though his 2024 reelection campaign has its own TikTok account. Biden’s administration has directed federal agencies to ban the app from government devices, citing national-security concerns.