The House is poised to ban TikTok and what will happen next

The House is Not Enforcing a Separation of TikTok from its Chinese Parent Company, but rather a Means of Giving Back

The House voted Wednesday to ban TikTok in the US if the app is not separated from its Chinese parent company. The bill needed to be approved with a two-thirds majority. Sixty-five members voted against it.

The creator of “That Midwestern Mom,” a 42-year content creator, went to viral two years ago when she uploaded one of her quirky Minnesota “salad” concoctions. The ingredients — Snickers bars, apples, Jell-O and Cool Whip — made her a viral sensation.

Other TikTokers use their platform as a means of giving back. William McCoy, who goes by Izzy White, is a former drug dealer and ex-felon from Baltimore. He uses his platform to help the homeless in his community.

“We want to have a forced separation because it’s not a ban,” Gallagher told NPR. “The TikTok user experience can continue and improve so long as ByteDance doesn’t own the company.”

“TikTok is not the only platform that collects that kind of information. Data from other platforms is made available to data brokers who in turn sell it to foreign governments.

Sen. Mike Gallagher: “Nothing but a ban” on the video sharing app “Project Texas”, and a critic of TikTok

The bill is expected to pass but its fate is unclear in the Senate where some lawmakers have said they would like to hold hearings and consider it further.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., who chairs the House Select committee on China and is the lead GOP sponsor of the bipartisan bill, maintains the bill does not amount to a ban of the video sharing app.

National security assessments show that the app has been used to target journalists and interfere with elections, and that it is a threat to user privacy. Intelligence and national security officials briefed members of the House on their analysis on Tuesday.

Gallagher says the lobbying campaign that TikTok launched — with push notices using location information to connect users by phone to their member of Congress — proves why the bill is needed.

There was one threatening suicide and one that impersonated one of my colleague’s sons, and member offices were flooded with calls. “That, to me demonstrates how the platform could be weaponized in the future.”

The bill also sets up a process for the president to address any future threats from any foreign owned apps if they are deemed a national security risk. There is a system for people to download their data and switch to another platform.

Illinois Democrat, Raja Krishnamoorthy, is the ranking Democrat on the House Select committee on China and helped write the bill. He pushed back on the company’s argument, telling NPR, “There’s no first amendment right to espionage, there’s no first amendment right to harm our national security.”

The company stresses that it has invested its own money to set up a firewall in an effort dubbed “Project Texas” to address data privacy concerns and keep users’ data in the U.S.

Donald Trump vowed to ban the social media app “Tikiktok” during his term in charge of the investigation of a Facebook ban

Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, proposed a ban back in 2020 when he was in the White House. But he does not support the House bill.

When he served as president he vowed to ban the social media app. Trump explained his new opposition in an interview with CNBC on Monday, saying that despite his the possible security risk, he opposed a ban because it meant users would move to another platform that he considered more dangerous.

There is a lot of good and there is a lot of bad with TikTok. He doesn’t like that you can make Facebook bigger if you don’t use TikTok, he thinks Facebook is an enemy of the people.

TikTok is full of videos that complain about the U.S. economy. One popular group of posts uses the term “Silent Depression.” The posts falsely suggest that the country is in worse shape today than it was in 1930. The posts of my colleagues Jeanna Smialek and Jim Tankersley were reported late last year.

Against a TikTok Ban on Social Media: The Wall Street Journal Views of the Lobbying and Propagation of the Israel–Palestine Conflict

After Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, TikTok flooded users with videos expressing extreme positions from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tilted toward the Palestinian side, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. “Many stoked fear,” The Journal reported. In November, videos praising an old Osama bin Laden letter also went viral.

The top U.S. intelligence official said on Monday that the Chinese government had used TikTok to promote propaganda in order to influence the upcoming elections. According to the report, China could try to influence the presidential election and amplify U.S. societal divisions.

Several supporters said the bill was not an all-out ban but just an incentive to get rid of ties to China.

But opponents of the bill on both sides of the aisle echoed each others’ concerns. Opponents fear that the bill will be a bad idea and that it will bring with it limits on free speech and power.

“It’s dangerous to give the president that kind of power, to give him the power to decide what Americans can see on their phones and on their computers,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).

Some Democrats expressed reservations about an all out ban, even though Chew faced bipartisan grilling. Despite a group of powerful lawmakers pushing for the legislation, the RESTRICT Act was doomed due to a strong lobbying campaign by TikTok and Republican worries about giving too much power to the executive branch.

The bill may be used to force the sale of other social media platforms including X which is owned by Musk, said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove noted that Chinese influence operations are not restricted to TikTok. In November 2023, Meta announced that it had removed a massive Chinese influence operation from its platforms that had targeted the US. Some smaller networks had also targeted users in India and Tibet.

Palermino sees TikTok Shop as a valuable tool for small businesses and says shuttering TikTok would have a negative short-term effect on Dieux. “Losing that would be challenging,” she says. While she’s confident Dieux could pivot to focus on other platforms, she suspects a TikTok ban could seriously impact other independent and up-and-coming brands within the United States in a big way. “It will hurt their business.”

Sigourney Norman, an artist and former lawyer who uses TikTok to discuss politics, race, gender, and sexuality, says she doesn’t buy lawmakers’ arguments that the bill will help protect the data of American users.