It’s been nearly one year since TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew visited Capitol Hill for a contentious hearing, but Congress is still trying to figure out how it wants to regulate the world’s top short-form video app. The latest proposal comes from a bipartisan group of U.S. Congresspeople, who are hoping to force ByteDance to divest TikTok.
The latest bill was introduced in the House by Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL, pictured above), who are the Chair and Ranking Member, respectively, of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi’s bill, which was co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of about a dozen Congressional reps, takes on “Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications.” The list of qualifying foreign adversaries includes Iran, Russia, North Korea, and ByteDance’s home country, China.
ByteDance and TikTok are specifically named in the bill. Should the measure be signed into law, ByteDance would have five months to divest TikTok. If it doesn’t, the popular video platform would be removed from app stores and web hosting services in the United States.
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Early last year, two proposals — one in the House and one in the Senate — aimed to ban TikTok as the app’s data security breaches became more apparent. The RESTRICT Act, authored by a bipartisan pair of Senators, used a lot of the same language about “foreign adversaries” that can be found in Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi’s bill. The House’s DATA Act, on the other hand, looked to target any app that sent data from the U.S. to China.
The two bodies of Congress have struggled to agree on the best way to regulate TikTok, but the latest House bill seems to written in the spirit of compromise. It contains the sort of anti-Chinese Communist Party rhetoric that has become common on the American right, but it also gives the U.S. President the power to designate additional foreign adversary controlled apps.
When Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) undertook a revision of the RESTRICT Act last year, she stressed that the government’s TikTok regulations should bring in both the legislative and executive branches. “The President should undertake a rulemaking process to protect United States data linked to sensitive populations that could be exploited by foreign adversaries to the detriment of the national security of the United States while preserving freedom of expression and rights under the Constitution of the United States,” Cantwell said at the time.
TikTok doesn’t seem to think that the latest Congressional proposal is any more realistic than previous attempts to control the app. “This bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it,” a TikTok spokesperson told The Hill. “This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs.”
Despite TikTok’s objections, Congress will entertain Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi’s proposal. In a statement, Rep. and Energy and Commerce Panel Chain Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said that she will “look forward to advancing the bill this week.”
