Lawmakers are sparring over a new bill which could ban TikTok in the United States.
The House passed The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in a 352–65 vote on March 13, but the bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate.
The bill would grant the president sweeping authority to force the sale of foreign social media companies to American tech corporations.
Praise and criticism of the bill have flowed from both sides of the aisle, with lawmakers debating its implications for the First Amendment, data security, government overreach, and the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Concerns about TikTok center on its parent company ByteDance, which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands but headquartered in Beijing.
Proponents of the bill argue that ByteDance is controlled by the CCP, which they say effectively renders TikTok into a tool for malign influence and to steal Americans’ data.
A key point of debate throughout Congress has been whether the bill can be construed as a “ban” on a specific company, or is more broadly aimed at the national security implications of foreign ownership.
Previous attempts to ban TikTok at both the state and national levels have been blocked by court decisions for violating Americans’ Constitutional rights.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) said that the bill is not a ban but a forced divestment of TikTok from CCP influence.
“This bill is not a ban and it’s not about TikTok. It’s about ByteDance,” Mr. Krishnamoorhti said in support of the bill on the House floor.
“Our intention is for TikTok to continue to operate, but not under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.”
There have been several incidents suggesting CCP influence or at least interference in TikTok’s operations.
A lawsuit filed by former ByteDance engineer Yintao Yu alleged that a “backdoor” in TikTok’s source code allowed CCP members who worked for ByteDance to view TikTok’s data during his time with the company in 2017 and 2018.
Likewise, China-based ByteDance employees used geolocation data from TikTok to stalk American journalists who had reported on alleged ties between the company and the CCP.
Some lawmakers have pushed back on the law for its perceived infringement on First Amendment rights, saying that the harmful practices attributed to TikTok are endemic to social media companies as a whole.
The bill’s detractors have jumped on the opportunity to condemn it as an overreach that would violate Americans’ right to self-expression and, possibly, violate existing laws governing the free flow of information.
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) said that the bill was essentially an attempt to circumvent the Berman Amendments, which exempt most information from regulation, including propaganda.
“The American People have a First Amendment right of access to foreign propaganda,” Mr. Bishop said.
“It might strike one as odd to hear that, but that’s because the proper relationship between government and citizen in the United States is that the citizen decides what to be exposed to and what ideologies to embrace and consider.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) seconded Mr. Bishop’s remarks, saying that the bill would become a “Trojan horse” for perpetual overreach from the executive branch.
Another critical issue at stake in the debate is the international flow of data, and whether the bill would effectively counter the CCP’s attempts to harvest data from American citizens.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said on the House floor that security laws in China require all companies to divulge data to the CCP upon request.
“Laws in China allow the Chinese Communist Party to compel companies like TikTok to share data with them whether the companies want to or not,” Mr. Pallone said.
Critics of the bill have noted that the United States has similar laws, however, which allow U.S. intelligence agencies to effectively take data from social media companies at will.
Compounding the issue is the fact that the CCP can currently access most of the same data legally by purchasing it from other social media companies on the open market through intermediaries known as data brokers.
The Biden administration has initiated a call for new regulations on what data can be sold by data brokers to overseas entities, though those rules will not be implemented anytime soon.
Notably, none of the bill’s detractors denied that the CCP posed a serious national security threat to the United States and may attempt to use TikTok to achieve its geopolitical goals. Opposition to the bill instead focused on whether it was legal, or effective.
