Behind the fight against TikTok

Washington, DC

Earlier this month, the video app TikTok started sending urgent push notifications to its 170 million American users. “Congress is planning a total ban of TikTok,” it said. “Speak up now.” The company called on TikTokers to defend their “constitutional right to free expression” and provided a handy link so that “businesses, creators and artists” could all contact their representatives directly and urge them to vote down the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

An army of angsty teens was activated but the effort backfired. Many kids got carried away, screaming out death and rape threats, and that underlined the point which elected officials behind the bill wanted to make: that TikTok, ultimately controlled as it is by the Communist Party of China, is brainwashing children and dangerously out of control.

Trump said the new law against TikTok would only strengthen Facebook — ‘an enemy of the people’

Ten days ago, the act, which would force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its US entity within six months, sailed through the House by a margin of 352-65. It duly moves to the Senate, and so it’s now US senators on the receiving end of the irate calls.

“The fact TikTok is urging school-aged children to call our offices while they are sitting in a classroom is another example of how China uses this company to harm our country and a good example of why Chinese Communist Party-controlled ByteDance should be forced to sell TikTok,” Senator Marco Rubio told The Spectator.

Rubio and other supporters of the legislation insist that it is not a ban, even if several members of Congress called it that when the bill was first introduced at the beginning of March. “The bill isn’t a ban of anything,” says Congressman Tim Walberg, who sits on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “It simply says that our platforms can’t do business being owned by a foreign adversary country.” Those countries are China, Iran, North Korea and Russia — and the bill is explicit in ringfencing them and them alone.

“In order for TikTok to continue in our country as an app that people can be on, they must not be controlled by the Chinese,” Walberg says. “They must divest themselves of any of that ownership. Now if TikTok decides, for whatever reason, ‘we don’t want to do that,’ then they will be banning themselves from being used by American customers. I don’t think they’ll do that.”

Opposition to the bill has brought together a broad and unusual coalition. Progressives such as representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna, who have their own vast followings on TikTok, are joining forces with libertarians such as senator Rand Paul, tech moguls such as Elon Musk and the vice-presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, among others. These figures argue that the bill’s passage has been rushed, that it could set a bad precedent, violate the First Amendment and constitute government overreach.

Crucially, Donald Trump, who as president pushed to ban TikTok on national security grounds, has come out against the bill. His volte-face appears to have been influenced by the conservative billionaire mega-donor Jeff Yass, whose company has a 15 percent stake in ByteDance. After meeting Yass at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said the new law against TikTok would only strengthen Facebook — “an enemy of the people.” This from a man who was all set to sign an executive order banning TikTok in 2020 until federal judges blocked the move.

But Trump is meeting fierce resistance from the China hawks within his own party, who insist that the national security case for blocking TikTok should overwhelm other concerns. “I know libertarians have a lot of fears that are justified about the government, but in certain cases, they act extremely naive on the potential of bad actors and what they’re willing to do,” says Walberg. “I don’t know if Rand Paul sat through any of the classified briefings I sat through, but it was enough to scare me on that alone.”

All major social media websites — including Instagram, Facebook and X — can register our keystrokes, listen to our conversations and use our data to target adverts at us. They’re all addictive and bad for young people’s brains. They cause us to feel worse about our bodies, make it easier for us to bully each other and share content that might later find itself branded “misinformation.”

The key difference with TikTok is the ownership — and who has the power to use the algorithm and that data for nefarious purposes. The CCP has a “golden share” in ByteDance’s Chinese business, which grants it a board seat and gives it the means to ensure that company practices adhere to CCP principles, blurring the line between Chinese government and Chinese enterprise.

ByteDance has already admitted to using the location data from TikTok to track where Financial Times and BuzzFeed journalists might have been getting leaks about the company. Of course, if the Chinese Communist Party really wanted to compromise your phone, they could do so without using TikTok — but the app’s ubiquity makes it much easier for them to do so. And there is little doubt that TikTok’s algorithm can be tweaked to ensure that users are fed enormous amounts of some types of political content, and none of others.

TikTok’s algorithm can be tweaked to ensure users are fed enormous amounts of some political content

“Americans would never stand for giving our own government access to this much personal information,” says Senator Pete Ricketts. “Allowing the Chinese Communist party to do so is a major national security threat.”

President Joe Biden has said he will sign the bill if it lands on his desk and last weekend the White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby urged the Senate to “move swiftly.”

And there is something of a precedent for the TikTok divestiture: the US government helped force the Chinese owners to give up control of the LGBT dating app Grindr in 2020, due to national security concerns.

But the introduction of an act marks a step-change in US government intrusion in the digital marketplace, and the Senate appears to be more divided on the subject, following what the Washington Post called a “furious lobbying blitz,” led principally by Yass, who has given money not just to Trump but to Ramaswamy and Rand Paul too.

The conservative Club for Growth, to which Yass is also a major donor, has been steering a Republican anti-TikTok-ban effort. It has retained former Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway as a lobbyist. “They will try to kill this slowly, refer it to committee… think about it some, and this time next year we’ll be right here having the same conversation,” says Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator. 

Senator Hawley has spent years pushing for TikTok to be stopped from operating in the US. His bill to ban TikTok from federal government devices was signed into law in late 2022, a move which the British government copied months later. Could the UK play copycat once again, by amending the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill currently winging its way through their parliament?

Last week, Britain’s Parliament moved to block the United Arab Emirates-backed American fund RedBird IMI from owning the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator through an amendment to the Digital Markets Bill on national security grounds. Could not an even more powerful argument be made against the Chinese-owned TikTok, now the leading single news source for young people in the UK?

“We should follow America,” the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith told Politico this week. “We should have done it ourselves. I’ve called for a ban before.”

The mood against TikTok has hardened in recent months. Pro-Israel voices are deeply concerned about the viral spread of antisemitic misinformation in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, particularly among the app’s young users.

The Jewish Federations of North America is backing TikTok’s divestiture due to concerns about antisemitism on the platform. “TikTok has become the news platform for young Americans,” says Congressman Mike Gallagher, who chairs the House Select Committee on the CCP. “We have to question whether it is wise to have our foremost adversary dictate what news and information young Americans get. The potential for propaganda abuse is simply too great.”

A forced divestiture could provide an opportunity for TikTok’s existing American investors, such as Yass and Sequoia Capital, to expand their control. Or new consortiums could emerge. The Trump administration Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin has expressed an interest in putting together such a bid, with funds from Saudi Arabia and other non-blacklisted countries all lining up to cash in on TikTok’s enormous reach.

An auction process for TikTok’s US operation, valued at around $100 billion, could prove particularly contentious in 2024, a presidential election year — especially if the buyers include former Trump officials on one side and pro-Democratic plutocrats on the other.

Faced with such a nest of problems, senators may ignore the White House pressure and kick the legislation on to 2025 or beyond. At least that would keep the kids quiet for a bit.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.