After coming out of committee on an almost unheard-of 50-0 unanimous vote, the bill giving platforms owned by any of four hostile nations to divest or stop working in America went to the House.
It may be that TikTok itself made the strongest point to pass this bill when they targeted users en masse to take specific political action on an issue that was important to the company. If they can do that — what might they do for another issue where CCP interests came into play?
And so, the vote to force a decision of Bytedance either to divest ownership of TikTok, or to have it blocked in America came to the floor.
There were some objections on the right. Some China hawks felt it didn’t go far enough. Or didn’t address the right problem. Libertarians raised 1A implications. Some even raised concerns about other big tech players getting an even tighter stranglehold on information supply.
Objectors on the left had their own reasons. And lobbyists for TikTok were pressing their leverage HARD on both sides.
In the end, the bill passed the House with a vote of 352-65.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., who chairs the House Select Committee on China and is the lead GOP sponsor of the bipartisan bill, maintains that the bill does not amount to a ban of the video-sharing app.
“What we’re after is, it’s not a ban, it’s a forced separation,” Gallagher told NPR. “The TikTok user experience can continue and improve so long as ByteDance doesn’t own the company.”
In practice, however, the bill would ban TikTok in the United States. Both the company and China, historically, have refused to consider divestiture.
TikTok has said the banning of a social media platform would amount to a violation of the free speech rights of millions of Americans.
Gallagher says classified and unclassified national security assessments show that the app is a threat to user privacy and that it’s been used to target journalists and interfere in elections. Top officials from intelligence and national security agencies conducted a classified briefing on their analysis for all House members on Tuesday. Classified information is not made public, in part, because it deals with matters of national security. — NPR
Whether the Senate will pick it up and run with this bill as well, slows it down, or grinds it to an absolute halt remains to be seen.
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