The BBC reports that:
After its passage in the House, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said that the bill would take “billions of dollars out of the pockets of creators and small businesses”.
“It will also put more than 300,000 American jobs at risk and it will take away your TikTok,” Mr Chew said in a video posted on TikTok and on X, formerly known as Twitter.
On Wednesday, several TikTok “creators” told the BBC they feared for their livelihood and businesses if the bill becomes a law.
“I buy items from small businesses and showcase them on my platform – I enhance them,” said Ophelia Nichols, an Alabama-based creator with more than 12m followers on the platform. “It’s the small businesses that will suffer…you have to worry about that.”
This argument rests upon the assumption that China would rather shut down TikTok completely than sell it to an American firm. The BBC quotes the company’s CEO complaining that “billions of dollars” would be taken “out of the pockets of creators and small businesses” and that “more than 300,000 American jobs” would be put “at risk,” and it quotes an Alabama resident who is worried that the “small businesses . . . will suffer” if TikTok goes away. But, if the bill passes, that decision will not be in the hands of the U.S. Congress, but of the Chinese Communist Party. Congress has decided — correctly, in my view — that an app as (deliberately) intrusive as TikTok should not be under the control of the CCP. It has not decided that TikTok should not exist.
That certainly represents a change — and a change that is the product of government force. It is not, however, the change that TikTok’s management keeps talking about. That is important. It’s also telling. If, as the CCP keeps implying, it would prefer to kill the company than to sell it for billions of dollars, then that is on it — and it will give us a solid insight into why China developed the platform in the first place.