The House of Representatives has passed a bill that could ban TikTok from the United States and grant the president sweeping new authorities to target foreign companies in the United States.
The bill would legally require social media giant TikTok to divest from its China-based parent company, ByteDance, or face a ban on U.S. app stores and hosting services.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said at the time that the bill was necessary to combat the regime’s influence in the United States.
“TikTok’s time in the United States is over unless it ends its relationship with CCP-controlled ByteDance.”
To counter that threat, the bill would create a process for the president to classify social media apps under the influence of certain foreign nations as hazards to national security and prohibit them from operating unless they transfer ownership to U.S. companies.
The bill would allow the president to force the divestiture of any social media company that is based in China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia and has more than a million users.
TikTok has lambasted the decision as an assault on free speech and even directed its users to call their representatives to demand a no vote on the bill.
“This bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it,” a TikTok spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs.”
Criticisms
That criticism hasn’t gone unheard, and the bill’s purpose and structure have been critiqued by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) said the bill would unfairly hurt millions of U.S. business owners who use TikTok as their primary income stream.
He told The Epoch Times: “170 million Americans use TikTok. So this idea that we’re not going to take into consideration not just the users but the 7 million small-business owners that use it as their main source of income for their family, I think it’s just really misguided.”
Similarly, Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) suggested that the Energy and Commerce Committee’s rush job on approval was designed to prevent hesitancy about the bill from growing. The bill, he said, was a de facto ban.
“I believe that it is an infringement upon our First Amendment rights and it violates the Constitution.”
Mr. Frost added that the bill “does not fix” the problem of data flows, as U.S. companies such as Google, Meta, and X, formerly Twitter, are still allowed to legally sell Americans’ data to data brokers, who then sell it directly to China, where the CCP may access it at any time.
Some prominent Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), meanwhile, have raised concerns that the bill would be used to insulate U.S. companies from competing with foreign firms and could be used in the future to target platforms that host perceived enemies of the administration.
“If it’s Meta, the content will be very unlikely to change, therefore all the conservatives, who think this bill will protect our children, will be greatly disappointed when it doesn’t change at all.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said on the House floor that the bill should be called the “Facebook Protection and Enhancement Act” and would positively affect Meta’s share prices if approved.
Likewise, some major think tanks have begun lobbying against the effort, which they say replicates the CCP’s authoritarian governance model.
Proponents of the bill say that such authority is necessary to prevent foreign powers from exploiting the United States’ relatively open market economy.
To that end, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), ranking member of the Select Committee on the CCP, said that the bill wasn’t a ban on any single application nor an affront to free speech but a choice between allegiance to the United States and China.
“This bill is not a ban, and it’s really not about TikTok,” Mr. Krishnamoorthi said. “This bill is a choice. And it’s a choice for ByteDance as well as any other social media app controlled by a foreign adversary.”
Likewise, Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) said there was no perfect solution to the issue but that the United States needed to respond to the CCP’s malign influence.
“There’s no perfect approach to any of this stuff, obviously,” Mr. Kildee told The Epoch Times. “For me, it really came down to whether or not we can take some action to try to deter this malign influence from [the CCP].”
