TikTok is facing its toughest survival moment. A foreign aid package that includes a divest-or-ban TikTok bill passed the Senate and lands on President Biden’s desk, where he’s expected to sign it today.
Legal challenges on First Amendment grounds will be the next step for the company now that the bill’s on track to become law, according to its statement on Sunday, a day after the House passed the package.
TikTok is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Beijing-based tech firm ByteDance.
ByteDance owns TikTok’s algorithm, which will be the crown jewel of the future divestiture deal. But will ByteDance sell it? Beijing has already said “no.”
The algorithm works ‘like a magician” with the “ability to selectively amplify and influence people’s attitudes by focusing their attention on the things that you want them to focus on,” according to experts.
TikTok can influence American culture because it has more than 150 million users in the United States, or about half of the nation’s population.
That makes TikTok a perfect weapon for cognitive warfare, Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank, told The Epoch Times.
Emotional content can “lead the audience to have the illusion of ‘independent thinking’ and attribute irrational emotions to ‘righteous indignation’ or ‘empathy,’ intensifying value confusions,” a Chinese state-funded research project discovered.
“The target of cognitive warfare is people; the battlefield is the entire human society,” a leading Chinese military theorist at an elite defense university wrote in 2017, the same year ByteDance introduced TikTok in the international market.
Will ByteDance “put out [TikTok] videos that make Americans fight with each other or spread conspiracy theories and get them at each other’s throat” if the Chinese Communist Party asks it to, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) asked at a Senate intelligence hearing this year.
FBI Director Christopher Wray affirmed it would be the case, adding that “that kind of influence operation, or the different kinds of influence operations you’re describing, are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national security concerns represented by TikTok so significant.”
Meanwhile, TikTok’s pressure campaign against the bill reveals the app’s influence. During the past month, lawmakers received thousands of calls, including some death threats, from TikTok users. The company also highlights its data privacy and contribution to small businesses in its advertisements at Washington’s Union Station and Reagan Airport.
TikTok has sought to join Congressional hearings so that its CEO can be seated next to executives from social media platforms Meta and X, according to a senior legislative aide. This way, Americans might view TikTok as just another California-based social media company.
If TikTok successfully creates that perception, it can capitalize on the xenophobia, anti-Asian, and free speech arguments against the bill, Geoffrey Cain, a journalist and technologist, told The Epoch Times.
It’s only a matter of time before TikTok is sold or banned, Cain said, citing the bill’s broad bipartisan support in Congress as a sign that the public awareness of the TikTok threat has reached a critical level.
—Terri Wu
SENATE PASSES $95 BILLION FOREIGN AID
The Senate in a late-night vote passed a $95 billion national security package that includes foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel, as well as the Indo-Pacific. The bills also include a measure to force TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company to address national security concerns.
It passed through the upper chamber in a 79–18 nighttime vote.
The bill will now go to the desk of President Joe Biden.
“I will sign this bill into law and address the American people as soon as it reaches my desk tomorrow so we can begin sending weapons and equipment to Ukraine this week,” Biden said in a statement praising its passage.
The bill’s passage through the upper chamber comes three days after the House passed the bills with bipartisan support over the objections of the GOP’s right flank.
Leadership in both parties was quick to heap praise on the bill, which has deadlocked Congress on the issue for months.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) framed it as a victory for Americans’ role in the world over what he described as “isolationism” within his own party.
“We can wish for a world where the responsibilities of leadership don’t fall on us,” McConnell said, “or we can act like we understand that they do.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was ecstatic at the bill’s passage, saying, “Finally, finally, finally, after more than six months of hard work and many twists and turns in the road, America sends a message to the entire world: we will not turn our back on you.
“Tonight, we tell our allies ‘We stand with you,’“ Mr. Schumer said. ”We tell our adversaries ‘Don’t mess with us.’”
Others in the upper chamber were less enthusiastic.
Asked his thoughts about the bill’s passage, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told The Epoch Times he felt “sick. Nauseated. We needed to secure our own border first. So I’m horribly disappointed we didn’t secure our own border.”
Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) criticized the bill’s lack of pay-fors, and told The Epoch Times, “If something is a crisis and a high priority, we should have the courage to pay for it to cut spending elsewhere.”
Together, the package includes $61 billion for Ukraine, $8.1 billion for the Indo-Pacific, and $26.4 billion for Israel and humanitarian aid for Gaza. It also includes a measure forcing Chinese divestment of TikTok and allowing the government to give seized Russian assets to Ukraine.
—Joseph Lord, Samantha Flom, and Stacy Robinson
NY PROSECUTION FACES UPHILL BATTLE
Legal experts indicated to The Epoch Times that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office faces an uphill battle in his prosecution of former President Donald Trump.
Opening arguments concluded on April 22 with the prosecution accusing President Trump of a conspiracy to cover-up his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels, or Stephanie Clifford.
The defense, led by attorney Todd Blanche, told the jury that the “reality is that there is nothing illegal about what happened” and attacked the credibility of Ms. Clifford and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
Statements by the prosecution indicated they thought President Trump violated a New York law that prevents “conspir[ing] to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”
The 34-count indictment focuses on alleged falsification of documents, typically a misdemeanor. Bragg’s office must prove that President Trump falsified documents in furtherance of another crime.
Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, told The Epoch Times that Bragg’s election-related claim was “absurd.” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton described the case as “something out of an MSNBC fever dream.”
Kristy Greenberg, a former federal prosecutor, defended Bragg’s case and wrote for MSNBC that “documents will clearly outline the criminal scheme to falsify business records to cover up hush money payments.”
The jury will ultimately decide the verdict. It’s unknown how jurors from liberal Manhattan will handle the case against President Trump.
Keith Johnson, a criminal defense attorney, told The Epoch Times that the case depends on how jurors view the prosecution and whether they see the case as an inappropriate use of resources. “I do believe it’s going to come down to whether the jurors will see this as a major breach of trust and confidence,” he said.
—Sam Dorman
BOOKMARKS
The New York Times has long faced claims from the right of having a strong left-wing bias. An article by The Epoch Times’ Dan Berger explores the media monolith’s failure in covering the Israel–Hamas war—and how that points to a larger bias among its staff.
After three days of deliberation and being sent back for further deliberation twice by the judge, a mistrial has been declared in the case of an Arizona rancher who shot and killed and illegal alien on his land, The Epoch Times’ Allan Stein reported. George Alan Kelly faced one charge of second-degree murder or manslaughter or negligent homicide and an additional charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in the shooting death of Mexican national Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea, 48, an illegal immigrant trespassing on Kelly’s ranch.
Conservative attorney John Eastman, a legal scholar who assisted in challenging the results of the 2020 election, claims he was “de-banked” for his role in challenging the election, The Epoch Times’ Steven Kovac reported. Eastman says that his bank account with Bank of America and the financial institution USAA was canceled without warning or notification.
The U.S. Supreme Court has put the final nail in the coffin for a bid to have Trump removed from the ballot in the crucial swing state of Arizona, The Epoch Times’ Tom Ozimek reported. The high court denied a writ of certiorari by John Castro, a registered Republican candidate for U.S. president in 2024, who fought in court to block Trump from the ballot in Arizona, and elsewhere.
A judge in North Carolina has struck down a 150-year-old state law prohibiting felons from voting, The Epoch Times’ Ryan Morgan reported. A challenge to the law was made on 14th Amendment grounds, with opponents of the law declaring it violated the Equal Protection Clause.
Trump again defended the embattled House speaker amid ongoing threats from the House Republican conference, The Epoch Times’ Samantha Flom reported. The former president said he thinks Mike Johnson is ‘trying very hard’ to do what he can with a razor-thin Republican majority.