TikTok bill makes strange bedfellows

Congress struck a major blow against TikTok’s Chinese ownership Thursday morning, by passing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would require parent company ByteDance to sell its US entity within six months in order to retain access to American app stores and web hosting services.

The bill, passed by a 352-65 margin, now heads to the Senate. It offered a rare time that former president Donald Trump found himself allied with progressive members of the Squad in opposition, while Representatives Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries joined forces in voting for the bill, which would help combat the espionage concerns that intelligence officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly raised. 

While this TikTok bill seems to have caught the company by surprise, it has shifted into full gear, deploying an army of child lobbyists pressured by the app to pressure Congress. This backfired spectacularly after kids threatened to both kill themselves and assassinate their members of Congress if this bill goes through.

Over the past few months, the debate in Washington concerning TikTok’s US ownership has prompted a lot of waffling and some outright flip-flops. One Republican megadonor in particular, Jeff Yass, has seemingly pulled as many strings as is humanly possible to tank this bill’s odds. Yass’s company’s stake in ByteDance runs into the tens of billions of dollars, so paying Republicans such as Kellyanne Conway and using groups he heavily funds, such as the Club for Growth, to do his bidding is a bargain investment. Conway’s pro-TikTok advocacy is particularly ironic, given the repeated headaches it has caused for her and her TikTok star daughter Claudia. 

It’s not often that Trump, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and Marjorie Taylor Greene find themselves allying with the Squad, but that’s what happened. They raised mostly debunked First Amendment concerns or, in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s case, “serious antitrust and privacy questions.” (She has over a million followers across two accounts on the app.)

Greene’s position is particularly ironic. A few months ago she was teeing off on TikTok, lamenting how “TikTok is brainwashing our kids with CCP propaganda [and] any conservative who wishes to share content gets immediately banned.” Greene cited how Twitter had banned her for years in announcing her opposition to the TikTok bill, which does not in fact ban the popular video sharing app.

Trump too had pledged to outright ban TikTok as president. Now, he fears that a required CCP divestment would inadvertently empower Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta universe. Many of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, however, were not convinced by opposition from either him or Carlson. Close Trump allies such as Representatives Jim Jordan and Troy Nehls — who wore a shirt with Trump’s face on it to the State of the Union, and who nominated Trump for speaker of the House last year — both voted for the bill. Florida’s Matt Gaetz, however, sided with his fellow Florida man in voting against the bill — one of only fifteen Republicans to do so. 

One interesting Democratic “yes” vote was North Carolina’s Jeff Jackson, who’s become a TikTok sensation, spurning national security concerns voiced by the Biden administration in the process. Jackson is now running for attorney general in North Carolina, and his Republican opponent, Dan Bishop, sided with Trump in voting against the bill. 

In announcing votes for the bill, members of both parties reminded constituents that they are not voting to ban TikTok. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, a progressive from Delaware, noted that “this bill lets you use TikTok WITHOUT forfeiting your personal data to the Chinese government.” 

Likewise, John James, the newest member of the House’s powerful Energy and Commerce Committee which helped drive the bill to passage, called TikTok “digital fentanyl,” but added “this legislation is not a TikTok ban, but instead would force the divestment of TikTok by a CCP-controlled tech company. This makes clear that Congress will never allow our adversaries to poison our young minds and digitally invade the United States.”

The bill is now destined for the Senate, where Kentucky senator Rand Paul is vehemently pushing back against the bill. Since 2020 alone, Yass has showered Paul with campaign cash, pouring over $10 million into Paul-aligned entities. Surely a coincidence.

The Republican-controlled House’s substantial bipartisan passage of the bill, combined with support from President Joe Biden, will make it tough for the Senate to oppose. But TikTok sees the existential threat the legislation can pose — and is sending every possible message that it’s not breaking up with Chinese control without a fight.