The breaking news yesterday: The House of Representatives passed a bill that could lead to banning TikTok in the U.S. The final vote was 352-65, a clear bipartisan win for the legislation, which now heads to the Senate for deliberation. If they pass it, President Biden says he’ll sign it. While the headlines might make it seem like TikTok is as good as dead, it really isn’t.
What is the TikTok ban bill?
First and foremost, this bill doesn’t “ban” TikTok outright. Even if it were to pass the Senate and be signed into law by the President, the app won’t disappear from your smartphone immediately.
Instead, the bill demands that ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company, divest its stake in the app to an American-owned company within six months of the bill becoming law. If ByteDance were to refuse, then the app would face a ban in the U.S. It’s a similar tactic the Trump administration took in 2020: Trump signed an executive order forcing ByteDance to choose between a sale or being banned. The courts blocked the order, however, and the Biden administration later revoked it, replacing it with an order to review more apps that could potentially compromise American security.
Lawmakers are increasingly concerned that TikTok’s direct ties to China puts American users’ data in jeopardy. These fears are not unfounded: In late 2022, ByteDance employees obtained the IP addresses of American journalists from their TikTok accounts, in an effort to discover the source of company leaks. Back in June, we learned that TikTok stores some user data from U.S.-based creators in China, after insisting the company keeps all American data within the United States.
TikTok likely doesn’t scrape more data from your smartphone than any other app you use. Congress could care less about your privacy from an altruistic point of view. The government’s concern, however, is that unlike Meta or Google apps, your data isn’t being taken by an American company; rather, it’s potentially leaking to a foreign nation, one with a complicated, if not adversarial, geopolitical relationship with the U.S. That, in addition to a potential for China to influence the content American users actually see on their feeds, is fueling an urgency with many lawmakers to do something about the massively popular app.
Where do we go from here?
All that said, TikTok’s banishment is far from certain. Unlike the House, which had a strong bipartisan support for the bill, the Senate isn’t likely to vote this through right away. While there is some enthusiasm to pass the bill from senators like Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, others, like John Cornyn, are skeptical of the bill as it currently stands. Some want to see broader language that puts the pressure on more apps, not just TikTok, while other senators worry how China will react if the legislation passes.
Another pressure is the popularity of TikTok itself. Some senators, particularly Democrats, are concerned that passing a bill that could lead to a TikTok ban would hurt President Biden in the upcoming election. Even Trump, who tried to ban the app in 2020, recently said the app shouldn’t be banned, although that’s likely more fueled by his feud with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who Trump blames in part for his loss in 2020.
So, there’s no clear path forward in the Senate, at least not yet. We’ll need to keep an eye on how that side of Congress is feeling in the coming days and weeks. However, unless a staffer can convince the president that a TikTok ban would hurt his already abysmal approval ratings with young voters, he will sign this bill if the Senate agrees on the language.
And if the bill is signed into law?
Look, this is America: If there’s one thing we love in this country, it’s a good deal. As such, if this bill were to pass, you better believe the business interests in the U.S. will be trying their darnedest to be the American company ByteDance sells to.
We’re already seeing this play out before the Senate has even deliberated: Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick reportedly pitched the idea of buying TikTok at a dinner last week, which included OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman. And Thursday, we learned former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is building a group of investors with the goal of acquiring the app. (Is it a prerequisite to be a “former” something in order to buy TikTok?)
That said, who knows if ByteDance will actually sell if Biden signs the bill into law. But they’ll certainly have their choice of buyer if they’re interested.
