The House on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force the Chinese owner of TikTok to either sell the wildly popular video app or face a ban in the United States.
The move escalates a showdown between Beijing and Washington over control of a wide range of technologies that could affect national security, free speech and the social media industry.
Republican leaders quickly shepherded the bill through the House with limited debate and it passed on a two-way vote of 352-65, reflecting broad support for legislation that would directly target China in an election year.
The action came despite TikTok’s efforts to mobilize its 170 million US users against the measure, and amid a push by the Biden administration to convince lawmakers that Chinese ownership of the platform poses serious national security risks to the United States, including the ability to interfere in elections.
The result was a bipartisan coalition behind the measure that included Republicans who defied former President Donald J. Trump supporting it, and Democrats, who also fell in line with a bill President Biden said he would sign.
The bill faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate, where Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York and the majority leader, has not committed to bringing it to the floor for a vote and where some lawmakers have vowed to fight it. And even if it passes the Senate and becomes law, it is likely to face legal challenges.
But Wednesday’s vote was the first time a measure that could broadly ban TikTok for consumers was approved by a full chamber of Congress. The app has been under threat since 2020, with lawmakers increasingly arguing that Beijing’s relationship with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, raises national security risks. The bill aims to convince ByteDance to sell TikTok to non-Chinese owners within six months. The president would sign off on the sale if it resolved national security concerns. If this sale did not take place, the app would be banned.
Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who is among the lawmakers leading the bill, said on the floor before the vote that it “forces TikTok to break with the Chinese Communist Party.”
“This is a common sense measure to protect our national security,” he said.
Alex Haurek, a TikTok spokesman, said in a statement that the House process “was secret and the bill was blocked for one reason: It’s a ban.”
“We are hopeful that the Senate will look at the facts, listen to their constituents and realize the impact on the economy — seven million small businesses — and the 170 million Americans who use our service,” he added.
On Wednesday, ahead of the House vote, Beijing condemned the push by US lawmakers and rejected the idea that TikTok posed a danger to the United States. At a daily press briefing, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, accused Washington of “resorting to hegemonic moves when no one can succeed in fair competition.”
If the bill were to become law, it would likely deepen a cold war between the United States and China over control of several important technologies, including solar panels, electric vehicles and semiconductors.
Mr. Biden announced restrictions on how American financial firms can invest in Chinese companies and limited the sale of sensitive Americans’ data, such as location and health information, to data brokers who could sell it to China. Platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are blocked in China, and Beijing said last year it would oppose the sale of TikTok.
TikTok said it has made every effort to protect US user data and provide third-party oversight of the platform, and that no government can influence the company’s recommendation model. He also said there was no evidence that Beijing used TikTok to obtain US user data or to influence the opinions of Americans, two of the concerns raised by lawmakers.
In an unusually aggressive move for a tech company, TikTok urged users to call their representatives last week to protest the bill, saying, “This legislation has a predetermined effect: a total ban on TikTok in the United States.”
TikTok has spent more than $1 billion on a sweeping plan known as Project Texas, which aims to handle sensitive user data in the US separately from the rest of the company’s operations. That plan has been under review for several years by a committee known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.
Two of the lawmakers behind the bill, Mr. Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois, said last week that the lawmakers were acting because CFIUS “hasn’t solved the problem.”
It is very unusual for a bill to garner broad bipartisan support but at the same time divide both parties. President Biden said he would sign the bill into law, but top House leaders, including Rep. Kathryn Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, voted against the bill. Mr. Trump said he opposed the bill, but many of his staunchest allies in the House, such as Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 4 Republican in the House, voted for it.
The vote resulted in something of a free-for-all, with a unique coalition for and against the bill. Representative Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the former speaker of the House, sat on the floor nodding along with far-right Republicans such as Representative Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, as they announced their support for the bill. At one point, he got up and crossed to the Republican side of the aisle to chat with Rep. Chip Roy, a far-right Texas Republican who had vocally supported the bill on the floor.
Several Republicans and Democrats voiced opposition to the bill based on concerns about free speech and TikTok’s popularity in the United States. Some legal experts said that if the bill were to become law, it would likely face First Amendment scrutiny in the courts.
Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Florida, said Tuesday that “not only am I no, but I’m a hell of a no.” He said the legislation was a violation of First Amendment rights. “I hear all the time from students that they get their information, the truth about what’s happened in this country, from content creators on TikTok.” He said he’s concerned about Americans’ data, but “this bill doesn’t fix that problem.”
There was no legislation last year after a heated hearing with Shou Chew, chief executive of TikTok, despite bipartisan support for regulating the app. But concern among lawmakers has grown even more in recent months, with many of them saying TikTok’s content recommendations could be used to spread disinformation, a concern that has escalated in the United States since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. .
“There were a lot of things in between, including October 7, including Osama Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ going viral on TikTok, and the platform continuing to see dramatic differences in content from other social media platforms. ,” Mr. Krishnamoorthi said in an interview.
There’s also a chance that even if the bill is signed into law and survives court challenges, it could collapse under a new administration. Mr Trump, who has sought to ban TikTok or force its sale in 2020, publicly reversed his position on the app last week. In a televised appearance on Monday, Mr Trump said the app posed a threat to national security but that banning it would help Facebook, a platform criticized by the former president.
“There are a lot of new kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it,” he said.
Mr Trump’s administration had threatened to remove TikTok from US app stores if ByteDance did not sell its stake in the app. ByteDance even appeared poised to sell a stake in the app to Walmart and Oracle, where executives were close to Mr. Trump.
That plan went awry in federal court. Multiple judges have blocked Mr. Trump’s proposed ban from taking effect.
Mr. Biden’s administration tried to turn to a legislative solution. The White House provided “technical assistance” to Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Krishnamurthy as they wrote their bill, Karine Jean-Pierre, a White House press secretary, said at a briefing last week. When the bill was introduced, a National Security Council spokesman was quick to call the legislation “an important and welcome step in addressing” the threat of technology putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk.
The administration has repeatedly sent national security officials to Capitol Hill to privately support the legislation and offer dire warnings about the dangers of TikTok’s current ownership. The White House briefed lawmakers ahead of a 50-0 committee vote last week that advanced the bill to the full House.
On Tuesday, officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department spoke to lawmakers in a classified briefing about national security concerns tied to TikTok.
Mr Gallagher and Mr Krishnamoorthi have previously supported a bill aimed at banning TikTok. The latest bill was seen as something of a last stand against the corporation for Mr. Gallagher, who recently said he would not run for a fifth term because “the framers intended that citizens serve in Congress for one season and then return to he personally lives for them.”
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Bailee Sandoval