After a bill that would have forced TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a national ban moved through the House at breakneck speed this week, its progress has slowed in the Senate.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader who determines what legislation passes, has not decided whether to bring the bill to the floor, his spokesman said. Senators — some of whom have their own versions of bills targeting TikTok — will have to be convinced. Other corridor legislation could be prioritized. And the process of getting the House bill and potentially rewriting it to suit the Senate can be time-consuming.
Many in the Senate are keeping their cards close to their vests about what they would do about the TikTok measure, although they said they recognized the House had sent a strong message by passing the bill, which passed 352-65. legislation forces TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the app within six months or face a ban.
“The lesson of the House vote is that this issue can almost spontaneously combust with the support it has,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, said in an interview Friday. He said adjustments could be made to the bill, but that there was bipartisan support to remove the application from Chinese ownership.
The delay in the Senate means TikTok is likely to face weeks or even months of uncertainty over its fate in the United States. That could lead to continued pressure, alongside maneuvering by the White House, the Chinese government and ByteDance. It’s also likely to spark potential talk of deals — whether real or imagined — while the uncertainty of losing access to the app hangs over the heads of TikTok’s creators and its 170 million US users.
“Almost everything is going to slow down in the Senate,” said Nu Wexler, a former Senate aide who worked for Google, Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “They will need some time to either massage their egos or build consensus.
The House passed the legislation a little more than a week after it was introduced, passing it with bipartisan support amid concerns that the app could compromise American users’ data or be used as a Chinese propaganda tool. The bill also received support from the White House. After saying last week that he opposed the legislation, former President Donald J. Trump said he now supported him in an interview with Fox News on Friday.
The bill has angered China, with one official saying the United States “has never found any evidence that TikTok poses a threat to US national security.” Beijing could move to block a sale if the legislation passes. Some lawmakers are concerned that the bill could go beyond the mandate of Congress by specifically mentioning TikTok, a violation of the Constitution’s ban on targeting individuals with laws. And TikTok argued that the secret drafting of the bill and the speed with which it moved through the House suggested lawmakers were aiming for a ban, not a sale.
TikTok, which has repeatedly said it does not and will not share data with the Chinese government or allow any government to influence its algorithmic recommendations, tried to respond to the bill, which caught the company by surprise.
On Wednesday, Shou Chew, chief executive of TikTok in Singapore, posted a video addressing users, saying that banning the service would hurt small businesses in the United States. He urged them to call their senators and fight back. (The company did the same with House representatives last week.)
TikTok has spent more than $1 billion on a sweeping plan known as Project Texas — because of its partnership with Austin-based Oracle — that aims to handle sensitive US user data separately from the rest of the company’s operations. The plan also provides for independent and government oversight of the platform to monitor for manipulation.
On Friday, searching for “KeepTikTok” on the app brought up a banner asking Americans to “Tell your senator how important TikTok is to you.” The message asked users to enter their zip codes and then informed them of the correct legislator to call.
“We continue to educate members of our community about the hasty ban bill, how it would infringe on their constitutional right to free expression, and how they can make their voices heard,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement. statement.
Senate offices have received hundreds of calls and voicemails about the bill from TikTok users in recent days, said two Senate aides, who were not authorized to discuss the calls publicly. Deputies said many of the calls appear to be from minors.
The White House is also lobbying behind the scenes, surprising some talent agencies that represent TikTok creators on Friday by inviting them to a briefing “about ownership of the social media platform,” according to an email obtained by two attendees, who spoke under the condition of anonymity. because the call was off the record.
John F. Kirby, the president’s national security communications adviser, emphasized that the White House had sought to sell off TikTok to a group of representatives from talent agencies such as CAA and Viral Nation, people in attendance said. There were many questions about how the agency’s clients and their jobs would be affected by the legislation, they said. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the call.
Congressional experts said the Senate would likely be harder to crack because its smaller number of individual members were more likely to try to put their own stamp on the legislation. A single member opposing a measure could make it difficult to speed up legislation. And, he must also consider and pass a major package of spending bills before the deadline for a partial government shutdown.
“I think the senators will do their due diligence,” said Lindsay Gorman, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “There’s going to be some rigorous discussion about that very question: whether we should just move or whether there’s room for tinkering.”
Some senators spoke in favor of the bill. The leaders of the Intelligence Committee, Sens. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, and Marco Rubio, R-Florida, said in a statement Wednesday that they would support the bill moving forward in the Senate.
Mr. Warner, who also has his own TikTok proposal, said Wednesday that he still had questions about various elements of the bill but was encouraged by the momentum it brought from the House.
“There’s a lot of ground we need to touch,” Mr Warner said. But, he added, it was “difficult to think of anything else that got more than 350 votes in a House that otherwise had no record of being fully functioning.”
Others were more cautious. Mr. Blumenthal said in the interview that the Senate needed to reconsider aspects of the bill, adding that the six-month deadline to reach a sale agreement may not be long enough.
He also said he had “heard of a number of very credible and prominent groups” interested in buying TikTok, but had not yet been reported to the press.
“There’s a clear path to achieving all the interests here — keeping TikTok but just putting it in different hands,” he added.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington and chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, is likely to have influence over whether the House legislation receives a Senate vote. She said last year that she was working on her own legislation to deal with TikTok and was noncommittal on whether she would support a vote on the House legislation. She said in a statement after the House vote that she planned to work with colleagues to “try to find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties.”
A Commerce Commission spokeswoman declined to make Ms. Cantwell available for an interview.
