A bipartisan coalition of House members voted Wednesday to pass a bill that would effectively force the Chinese parent company of TikTok to sell the video-sharing platform or face a ban in U.S. app stores.
The bill passed 352 to 65, with 15 Republicans and 50 Democrats voting against it. The legislation is now headed to the Senate, where it is expected to face a more difficult path. President Joe Biden said he would sign the bill should it reach his desk, even though his 2024 reelection campaign created a TikTok account last month.
The Wednesday vote offered a rare glimpse of bipartisan cooperation on Capitol Hill as China hawks and tech skeptics on both sides of the aisle joined to strike an unexpected blow against the massively popular social-media platform, despite the political risks associated with alienating the app’s young user base.
“We can’t take the chance of having a dominant news platform in America controlled or owned by a company that is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, our foremost adversary,” said Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), who leads the House Select Committee on the CCP. Gallagher was one of the bill’s authors.
Both Republicans and Democrats have been concerned about China’s ability to surveil American users of the social-media app, but former president Donald Trump has been lobbying against the TikTok legislation in recent days, marking a reversal of his previous position on the national-security risk posed by the app.
The former president’s change of heart came soon after meeting with billionaire investor Jeff Yass, who holds a 15 percent stake in ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. Yass is also a Republican megadonor who has donated over $60 million to Club for Growth, a Trump-associated conservative super PAC pushing back against the ban.
Trump first spoke out against a potential TikTok ban on Truth Social last week, claiming the legislation would only empower Facebook to take TikTok’s place. He echoed these comments in a Monday interview with CNBC, calling Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook an “enemy of the people.”
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok, but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you’re going to make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media,” Trump said. In the interview, he denied speaking with Yass about TikTok.
TikTok itself and its CEO have also been lobbying against the legislation after the company was blindsided by bipartisan support for such a ban.
“This process was intentionally conducted in secret because the bill authors knew it was the only way they could move it forward,” a TikTok spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal.
Last week, TikTok mobilized resistance to the new bill by sending notifications to its 170 million U.S. users, urging them to call their representatives to oppose the bill. The pop-up messages even included the representative’s name for users in different districts and a button to help them place the call. This move angered some lawmakers as their offices were flooded by phone calls in the past week.
On Tuesday, TikTok CEO Shou Chew went to Capitol Hill ahead of the expected vote.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), who was part of the small contingent voting against the bill, said it would “open Pandora’s box” and enable “future government censorship of Americans and our precious First Amendment.”
The bill is expected to face stiff opposition in the Senate, as prominent Republicans such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky have expressed opposition to the measure. Other senators, however, urged the upper chamber to join the House in approving it.
“We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok – a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party,” Senators Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Mark Warner (D., Va.) said in a joint statement. “We were encouraged by today’s strong bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives, and look forward to working together to get this bill passed through the Senate and signed into law.”
The 12-page bill says that TikTok must be sold within six months to a buyer that the federal government approves so that ByteDance no longer owns or controls the app. Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary, known for his television appearance on Shark Tank, offered to purchase TikTok and transform it into a “new American company” earlier this week.