When TikTokers flooded US congressional offices with calls urging their representatives to vote against banning their beloved app, many were met with a mixture of indifference and polite clarifications that Congress was only trying to force a sale, not impose a ban.
But behind the scenes, much of Capitol Hill was furious. What TikTok said was “straight-up disinformation”, said a congressional staffer.
On March 6, a day after the House of Representatives introduced a bill that would ban TikTok’s operations in the US if its Chinese-based parent company ByteDance didn’t divest in about six months, TikTok sent a notification to its US users asking them to “speak up” to prevent a “total ban”.
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The bill’s sponsor, Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin and chair of the House select committee on China, framed TikTok’s actions as “a campaign to manipulate and mobilise American citizens on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party”. Before the vote on the House floor – scheduled a mere eight days later – Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington, accused the company of forcing teenagers to call their representatives.
The lawmakers’ depiction of a top-down influence campaign by TikTok infuriated the platform’s users, many of whom made videos speaking about the positive impact the app has had on their education, mental health, community building and small-business ventures.
“I just called them of my own accord,” small-business owner Ben Stanley said angrily in a video, noting that he never even saw the notification. Stanley shared a recording of his call to his congresswoman, Mary Miller of Illinois, in which he vowed to spend the next two weeks actively campaigning against her and her party if she voted for the bill.
There are signs that their efforts may be paying off. In subsequent days, a growing contingent of lawmakers made it clear that they would vote against the bill. Last Wednesday on the House floor, 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans across the political spectrum voted “nay”. While still a minority compared to the 352 who voted for the bill, the diverse crew of dissenters suggests that TikTok could not be simply captured by a pro- versus anti-China framework as its critics desire.
The scale of the dissent against efforts to restrict the popular platform, much more visible than in previous years when the app faced similar pressures, also portends increased difficulties for the anti-TikTok movement should it persist. The latest effort to restrict TikTok faces its next battle in the Senate, where support appears mixed and a vote has not yet been scheduled.
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Founded in 2012, TikTok’s owner ByteDance is privately held and headquartered in Beijing. TikTok said last year that about 60 per cent of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors like General Atlantic, 20 per cent is owned by ByteDance employees, and a final 20 per cent is owned by the company’s founder.
ByteDance’s base in China has caused concern that US user data could be subject to Chinese government control – though TikTok has repeatedly denied ever sending data to Beijing or being asked to do so.
Lawmakers are also worried about the potential for TikTok to manipulate its algorithm to influence users towards Beijing’s narratives. Though they have not presented evidence for this concern, it is one that has grown since the Israel-Gaza war when pro-Palestinian messaging spread on the app.
Critics of efforts to ban the app – which once included only a handful of libertarian and progressive lawmakers like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York – note that the threats posed by TikTok are hypothetical rather than demonstrated.
It is “largely a potential threat”, said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the lead Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who voted against Gallagher’s bill last week.
In an interview with CNN, Himes said he cared about the constitutional protections for free speech, citing a decision by a Montana court to block a ban of TikTok in the state.
“Just because the Congress is falling all over itself for each member to demonstrate how hawkish they are on China, that doesn’t mean compromising the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment,” Himes said.
At least four House lawmakers from both sides of the aisle said that closed-door briefings on the matter did not convince them that the threat was substantial enough to sacrifice fundamental freedoms.
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Protecting free speech was cited by 33 House members as a reason for not supporting Gallagher’s bill, with a handful of them cautioning against emulating China’s censorship system.
In justifying his “nay” vote on the House floor, Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat from of California, cited free speech groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which have consistently argued against banning TikTok ever since then president Donald Trump tried to curb the app’s influence in 2020.
Garcia, along with other progressive legislators, is also an advocate for the app’s educational, economic and community-building aspects. “As an openly gay person, it’s a place where I get so much gay information, where gay creators come to share news.”
Any ban on TikTok will cause “huge harm to our national economy,” he added, noting that some business owners rely solely on the app.
Gallagher’s bill, formally called the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, establishes a process for the president to designate apps controlled by “foreign adversary” countries to face restrictions on operations in the US, but singles out TikTok and ByteDance for immediate action.
In opposing Gallagher’s bill, at least 26 Democratic representatives pushed for comprehensive privacy legislation to address data security concerns, rather than targeting a single app or company. Echoing TikTok users, legislators noted that even if TikTok were banned, China could buy American user data from other apps, including US-based Facebook and Instagram.
Meanwhile, House Republicans were quick to emphasise that a vote against Gallagher’s bill was not an endorsement of Beijing, with eight of them citing concerns about overly broad expansions of government power. “It’s the libertarian in me,” said Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina.
As the most vocal antagonist to a TikTok ban in the Senate, Rand Paul has spoken consistently against giving “unprecedented authority to President Biden and the surveillance state”. In 2023, Paul blocked an effort by Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, to fast track a TikTok ban bill through the Senate, and pledged last week to stop such attempts for Gallagher’s bill in the chamber.
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Few Republicans appeared to be have been swayed by the change of heart by Trump, who came out against banning TikTok two weeks ago after meeting with ByteDance investor Jeff Yass. In a contrast to President Joe Biden, who said he would sign Gallagher’s bill if it passed both congressional chambers, Trump said a ban would only empower TikTok’s competitor Facebook.
Arguing that banning TikTok would open a “Pandora’s box” to speech restrictions, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, said she made her decision independently without consulting Trump. Supporting Trump “doesn’t mean we’re all robots”, she said.
Only two Republicans mentioned Trump explicitly when explaining their “no” votes, with one citing the need to protect Trump-founded social media platform Truth Social from claims of foreign influence.
Twenty lawmakers, including Representative Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat and ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, noted the rushed nature of the bill as a reason to not support it. Meeks, as with some other members of the House Democratic leadership, urged Congress to focus on more pressing issues, such as funding for Ukraine.
Several lawmakers, including Meeks, also pointed to the difficulty of achieving the divestiture offered – an analysis that experts agree with.
“Divestiture would be difficult given any time frame, but likely almost impossible in six months,” said Caitlin Chin-Rothmann of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
“TikTok is significantly larger than it was back in 2020 when Trump first ordered a sale, and it is larger than Twitter was in 2022 when Elon Musk purchased it. Any buyer would need to have a significant amount of resources as well as a high level of risk tolerance.”
When Trump was trying to ban TikTok in 2020, the app had about 50 million users in the US. That number has grown to 170 million in 2024, according to TikTok.
Chin-Rothmann said other complicating factors included potential antitrust scrutiny due to the size of the acquisition. The Chinese government could also block the transaction under export control laws that allow it to prevent sales of sensitive technologies, such as TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, she added.
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Facing pressures to reduce the Chinese government’s potential interference in the app, TikTok began implementing a mitigation strategy in 2022 called Project Texas and entered into now-stalled negotiations with the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
Project Texas would cede authority over TikTok’s American operations to a three-person board selected by CFIUS. That board would run a subsidiary called US Data Security, which would handle all of the app’s critical functions in the United States, including user data, engineering, security and content moderation.
But while TikTok’s efforts to address security concerns are something that TikTok users have picked up on, they have had little sway over lawmakers.
“Many members of Congress have already made up their minds about TikTok or see it as an easy messaging opportunity during an election year ... there is probably little that TikTok can say to change their minds,” Chin-Rothmann said.
Still, some House members and senators have expressed openness to meeting with TikTok – indeed, some met with TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi last week.
But for Representative Maxwell Frost, a Democrat and the youngest member of Congress at age 27, hearing from his Florida constituents was enough for him to vote no – a “hell no”.
For the majority of lawmakers, however, constituent engagement was one of many factors, or did not factor in much at all in their stance.
A staffer for a Democratic lawmaker who voted “nay” said the lawmaker’s decision was informed mostly by how important TikTok had become for small-business owners and believing that there were less restrictive means than banning an app. The staffer noted that the lawmaker did not receive a significant number of constituent calls.
Regardless of the political winds, most TikTok users remain firm against the ban. Many took to the app to express scepticism it was truly about the threat from China, alleging that the anti-TikTok movement has been “bought” by Big Tech and other forces.
“It’s all about control,” said one user with more than 12,000 followers. “They just want to control us and control where we get our information.”
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Others expressed doubt about TikTok’s Chinese government ties and manipulation of information.
A day before the vote, dozens came to Washington from across the country to push against a potential ban.
Flanked by a small contingent of lawmakers, JT Laybourne of Farmington, Utah, spoke of his frustration at some members of Congress for dismissing the app as something for “dumb TikTok dances”.
“It’s changed our lives,” he said, highlighting how it helped him and his wife garner support when he went through open-heart surgery.
“So when I hear these elected officials literally mock and make fun of TikTok and its creators, I’m disgusted.”
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