SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING - In some ways, Wednesday’s House vote to ban or force the sale of the social media app TikTok was a landmark moment. For the first time, U.S. lawmakers passed legislation targeting a Chinese-owned entity that also happens to be one of the most popular apps in the world. It was a bipartisan vote, and it wasn’t close; the measure passed by a 352-65 margin.
The bill’s co-sponsor Mike Gallagher (R.-Wisconsin) said Wednesday that it “forces TikTok to break up with the Chinese Communist Party.”
Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, said the bill would decrease "the likelihood that TikTok user data is exploited and privacy undermined by a hostile foreign adversary."
The House bill would force TikTok’s parent, the Chinese internet company ByteDance, to sell TikTok within six months or face a ban from U.S. app stores and web-hosting platforms. The bill’s supporters said TikTok’s Chinese ownership was a national security risk that outweighed concerns about limiting free speech.
Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, a Cipher Brief expert and Senior Director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, called the vote “very important.” The bill, he said, “is about national security and not a first amendment issue. Keeping TikTok under Chinese control is simply not an option, owing to the Chinese government’s stranglehold over the platform’s algorithm and all user data.”
But even as the gavel came down in the House, a sale or ban of TikTok was far from certain. The bill must clear the Senate, after which any sale would have to be approved in China and by the U.S. Congress. Powerful lobbying campaigns and legal contests are already in the works. And while the House vote brings momentum to a years-long push against TikTok’s Chinese owners, what comes next - for the app, its 170 million U.S. users and for the U.S.-China relationship - is far from clear.
Assessing the threat
The bill’s name alone spoke to lawmakers’ concerns: “The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act." Rep. Gallagher, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, stressed that it wasn’t a “ban” but a “forced separation” from the parent company. “The TikTok user experience can continue and improve,” Gallagher said, “so long as ByteDance doesn't own the company."
Those who support the move against TikTok have argued for years that given ByteDance’s ownership, and the relationship between Chinese companies and the government in Beijing, China could force ByteDance to surrender the personal data of Americans.
A second concern, that China could use TikTok’s algorithm to feed propaganda to anyone who uses the app, has been raised by U.S. intelligence leaders as well, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
In their annual Threat Assessment Report, released this week, the U.S. intelligence community said that "TikTok accounts run by a [Chinese] propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties” during the 2022 midterm elections, and warned that similar efforts were possible in 2024.
Graham Webster, Editor-in-Chief of DigiChina and a Stanford University Research Scholar studying technology and US-China relations, said that while the concerns are legitimate, the bill’s focus on ownership misses the point.
“It's possible to have data security threats and not be owned by the country that you're concerned about, and it's possible to have procedures in place that put control in trusted hands while having ownership that happens to be in a country that's not trusted,” Webster told The Cipher Brief.
“The thing we're interested in is who would have the ability to control the fate of data security, or the ability to affect content choices and algorithmic choices,” he said. “I find it difficult to understand why legislators won't just focus on the thing itself and instead have to focus on who owns the thing.”
For their part, TikTok and its supporters have argued that there is already ample American influence over the company. TikTok says that roughly 60 percent of the firm is owned by global institutional investors, including Black Rock and Susquehanna International Group, and that three of its five board members are American. ByteDance also says it has spent more than $1 billion on a plan that would store American users’ data on servers operated by the U.S. company Oracle.
In a statement this week, TikTok criticized Congress for "attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression. This will damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience, and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country."
Gallagher and other supporters of the bill called TikTok's measures to safeguard Americans’ data insufficient. As for the free-speech argument, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D.-Illinois) said, “There’s no first amendment right to espionage.”
Coming next: A fight
The next steps in the TikTok saga will involve politics, business and possible legal battles.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has yet to commit to scheduling a vote on the bill, and there is expected to be more opposition in the Senate than there was in the House. President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill, but Donald Trump - once an outspoken supporter of the measure - now says he opposes a ban, because he believes it would unfairly benefit Facebook.
In an interview with CNBC on Monday, Trump said, "the thing I don't like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media."
Some free-speech advocates have blasted the bill, including Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost, who at 27-years-old is the youngest member of Congress.
"I think that it is a violation of people's First Amendment rights," Frost told NPR. "TikTok is a place for people to express ideas.”
Meanwhile, TikTok’s lobbying efforts against the measure are well underway. TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew, a native of Singapore, went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, and last week, TikTok distributed a message to its U.S. users, suggesting they call their representatives to safeguard “their Constitutional right to free speech."
That prompted a retort from Gallagher’s Select Committee on China, which wrote to TikTok demanding that it stop "spreading false claims in its campaign to manipulate and mobilize American citizens on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party."
If the bill does become law, ByteDance would have six months to find a buyer for TikTok that wins the approval of the U.S. government, and guarantees that ByteDance no longer controls TikTok or its algorithms.
Webster said an “absolute torrent of litigation” would likely follow the bill’s signing. Bloomberg reported this week that TikTok intends to “exhaust all legal challenges” before even considering divesting from ByteDance, and that selling the app would be a last resort for the company. A divestiture would also require approval by the Chinese government, which said last year that it would firmly oppose a forced sale.
Who might that buyer be? The sheer volume of users would narrow the list to deep-pocketed companies - Microsoft, Google and Meta have been mentioned - but any offers from those companies might run into a buzzsaw of antitrust issues.
Many of the questions would rest with ByteDance itself. Will it agree to sell? If so, would the company sell all of TikTok, or just its U.S. operation?
“You’re not going to be able to force ByteDance to divest,” James Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The New York Times.
China’s response
Wednesday’s vote was the latest salvo in the technology wars that have roiled the U.S.-China relationship for years - a conflict that has involved everything from artificial intelligence to semiconductors to social media platforms.
“In recent years, although the United States has never found evidence that TikTok threatens U.S. national security, it has never stopped suppressing TikTok,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin said Wednesday.
Wang went on to suggest that the House vote might bring longer-term damage to the relationship. “This practice of bullying — if you cannot win in fair competition — disrupts the normal business activities of enterprises, damages the confidence of international investors (and) undermines the normal international economic and trade order, which will eventually backfire on America itself.”
State media in China joined the attacks. The Global Times called the bill an example of "ugly behavior" and an abuse of "the concept of national security.”
Whither TikTok - and the India example
The mix of domestic politics and geopolitics in play suggest that all those 170 million eager TikTok users in the U.S. can relax: the app isn’t going away anytime soon.
Senate passage will hinge on considerations ranging from the political power of young Americans to Trump’s latest shift; and if the bill does become law, the app’s future will rest on how ByteDance and China choose to respond during that six-month window.
“I don't think divestiture will happen,” Webster said, citing the various hurdles that lie ahead.
Montgomery is at least bullish on the bill’s chances. He believes the lopsided House vote “will influence the Senate - demonstrating that both sides of the aisle in a partisan House came together to aggressively support this.”
In the event that the bill becomes law and TikTok isn’t sold in the six-month period, then the app would be banned in the U.S. Any app stores or web companies that sold or hosted the app in the U.S. would face prosecution.
If all that comes to pass, TikTok's faithful users in the U.S. could soon find themselves in the place that hundreds of millions of TikTok users in India landed when that country banned TikTok in 2020. Until then, India had been TikTok’s biggest market outside of China; its users wound up migrating in large numbers to Instagram and various Indian apps.
One place unlikely to see any change in app use is in China itself. Often lost in the TikTok debate is the fact that the app isn’t available in China, for all the same reasons that Facebook and Instagram aren’t available, either: they are all considered threats to the Chinese state’s monopoly on public speech and information. Users in China use Duoyin, an app that is similar to TikTok but is available only in China, and subject to government monitoring and censorship.
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