TikTok faces uncertainty Fate is in us again.
After a sudden flurry of activity in the House of Representatives this week, TikTok has become the target of a new government campaign to separate the company from its Chinese ownership or force it out of the country.
TikTok is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, but is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance. This relationship raised eyebrows among American officials, who warned of the possibility of taking advantage of the application to advance the interests of the opponent.
What happened this week?
This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee introduced a new bill designed to pressure ByteDance to sell TikTok.
This legislation, the Protecting Americans from Applications Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act, would make it illegal to distribute software with ties to U.S. adversaries within the country. (Ownership is counted by an entity based in a hostile country, such as ByteDance in China.)
In the language of the bill, which continues to explicitly name TikTok, “it would be unlawful for any entity to distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or update of) a foreign application controlled by the adversary.” If the bill becomes law, Apple's App Store and Google Play will no longer be able to legally distribute the app in the United States
The bill, which many of its critics reasonably describe as a “ban,” would force ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months so the app can continue to operate here. It also enables the president to oversee this process to ensure that it results in the company in question “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.”
After learning of the bill's surprisingly rapid progress in Congress, TikTok responded with a mass in-app message to US users on Thursday morning, with a button to contact their representatives.
“Speak now – before your government strips 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free speech,” the letter read. “Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and ask them to vote no.”
Despite TikTok's decision to rile up its users — or perhaps because of it — the bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok passed through the House Energy and Commerce Committee by 50 votes on Thursday. Now that the fast-tracked bill is out of committee, it is expected to be fully voted on in the House next week.
Before the vote, subcommittee members held a classified briefing with the FBI, Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the request of the Biden administration, Punchbowl News reported.
This week, President Biden also explicitly said he would sign the bill if it reached his desk. “If they approve it, I will sign it,” Biden told a group of reporters on Friday.
Why does the US say TikTok is a threat?
To be clear, there is currently no public evidence that China has ever exploited Americans' TikTok data stores or otherwise harmed the app.
However, this fact has not prevented the US government from highlighting the possibility that China could do so if it wanted to. The Chinese government has not been shy about practical cooperation with the country's companies or keeping critics from the business community on side.
FBI Director Chris Wray once warned that users may not see “outward signs” if China interferes in TikTok. “There is something very sacred in our country — the difference between the private sector and the public sector — that is a line that does not exist in the way the Chinese Communist Party operates,” Wray said at a Senate hearing last year.
TikTok has strongly denied these accusations. “Let me say this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” TikTok CEO Xu Ziqiu said last year during a separate hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
To TikTok's credit, if China wanted information about American users, Beijing could easily turn to data brokers who openly sell troves of user data around the world with little oversight.
Since the US has not provided any public evidence to support its serious claims, there is a significant disconnect between how politicians feel about TikTok and how most Americans do. For many TikTok users, the US crackdown is just another way politicians are out of touch with young people and don't understand how they use the internet. To them – and others skeptical of the US government's claims – the situation appears to be purely political between two countries with bad blood, sometimes tinged with a touch of racism.
what is happening now?
The campaign to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company began with an executive order during the Trump administration. Trump's threats against the company culminated in a plan to force TikTok to sell its US operations to Oracle in late 2020. In the process, TikTok rejected a takeover offer from Microsoft but ultimately did not sell to Oracle either.
But that executive action failed in 2021 after Biden took office. But last year, the Biden administration took matters into its own hands, escalating the pressure campaign against the app alongside Congress. Now, it appears that this campaign is back on track.
The new bill, which would effectively ban TikTok in the United States if it is not separated from its Chinese ownership, has only received a House committee vote so far. President Biden has expressed his support for the legislation, but the bill still needs a full vote in the House.
Even if it passes the House this week, which is possible given that lawmakers are willing to vote on it so quickly, the anti-TikTok legislation still faces an unknown fate in the Senate. We may learn more next week if senators start considering the possibility of creating their own version of the House bill. The Senate likely won't have the same appetite to go after TikTok this year, which could either derail or kill the House effort outright.
There is some strong bipartisan support in Congress for regulating TikTok, but things are still very complicated. The most obvious complication is that TikTok is hugely popular and we're in an election year. TikTok has 170 million users in the US, and they are unlikely to watch quietly as Congress effectively bans their favorite source of entertainment and information.
“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a complete ban of TikTok in the United States,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Horik told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.
“The government is trying to strip 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free speech,” Horick said, foreshadowing the massive public outcry that could result. “This will hurt millions of businesses, deprive artists of an audience, and destroy the livelihoods of countless creatives across the country.”
TikTok's cultural reach is so great that Biden is campaigning on TikTok, even as the White House calls the app a national security threat.
Even if the bill makes it out of the House and finds support in the Senate, the US scheme to force ByteDance to sell TikTok may fail – an outcome that may or may not lead to a ban. China has previously stated that it will oppose the forced sale of TikTok, something that is within the Chinese government's rights after the country's export rules were updated in late 2020.
TikTok itself would certainly pose a strong legal challenge against forced sales, as it did when the Trump administration previously tried to accomplish the same thing through executive action. TikTok also filed a lawsuit when Montana attempted to enact its own statewide ban, which ultimately led to a federal judge issuing an injunction and blocking those efforts.
Beyond Congress and the courts, TikTok has a direct line to a large swath of the American electorate and a fleet of creators who control many millions of loyal followers. These tools of power should not be underestimated in the coming battle.
