Senators who passed the TikTok ban are realizing a lot of people won’t like it

At the time of this article, recent updates suggest that the U.S. Supreme Court will not rule in TikTok‘s favor this week. If that prediction comes true, the “divest-or-ban” law — which forces TikTok to be either divested from parent company ByteDance or banned in the United States — will go into effect on January 19.

TikTok has warned that the divest-or-ban law (which is more likely to result in the latter of those outcomes) will have massive economic and legal ramifications if enacted. The embattled app sees the U.S. statute as an overzealous regulation that would unfairly target specific companies while limiting Americans’ civil liberties.

As the final countdown to the law’s start date continues unabated, some of the politicians who initially passed it are starting to see TikTok’s point. Senators and Congresspeople who voted in favor of the bill are receiving widespread hate on social media, and a few of them have even proposed a new measure that would give TikTok the time it needs to shore up its defense.

The proposal in question comes from the desk of Ed Markey (D-MA), a progressive leader who has joined with Republicans to decry the incoming TikTok ban. With the Extend the TikTok Deadline Act, Markey and his co-sponsors — U.S. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — are trying to push back the start date on what Markey describes as a “rushed through” law.

“Today, TikTok is a space where users share critical resources during emergencies such as the Los Angeles wildfires, earn money to cover groceries and medical care, and build community in challenging times,” Markey said in a statement. “The Extend the TikTok Deadline Act is a straightforward, one-sentence bill designed to give Congress the time needed to fully assess the implications of this ban. I urge my colleagues to act swiftly on this legislation.”

Though Democratic lawmakers may stand up as TikTok allies on the Senate floor, their voting records tell a different story. The TikTok ban was passed as part of aid packages for Ukraine and Israel, making it more difficult for opponents to muster the political capital they’d need to vote it down. Perhaps for that reason, Markey, Wyden, and Booker all voted in the law’s favor

. Among the TikTok Deadline Act’s co-sponsors, only Khanna (whose district includes the HQs of several major tech companies) can say he voted against the TikTok ban last year.

Some Americans have noticed what they see as blatant hypocrisy. TikTok videos from Senators like Booker and Bob Casey (D-PA) have been flooded with comments from aggrieved users who want to know why those pols are using an app they’re so eager to ban. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has received “you’re fired” comments on his TikToks, implying that he lost his reelection bid because he used TikTok while still voting to ban it.

TikTok’s band of political hypocrites — Senators Booker, Casey, and Brown — are all Democrats. That’s a bit of an ironic twist, since the effort to restrict the app began in Republican-controlled statehouses. But the GOP regulators knew enough to stay off TikTok in the first place; a January 2023 report from the Idaho Capital Sun found that nearly all of the 32 Congresspeople with active TikTok accounts belong to the Democratic Party.

There’s a lesson in there for the Dems: Perhaps party brass wagered that U.S. TikTok users would not be aware enough to realize that the Biden Administration was providing performative support for TikTokers while attempting to strip them of their livelihood behind the scenes. What happened instead was that public support for the TikTok ban fell off a cliff, the Dems were routed in the November elections, and Donald Trump’s defense of TikTok led the app’s officials to cozy up to him days before the start of his second term in the Oval Office.

So while Senator Markey’s Extend The TikTok Deadline Act is a potential lifeline for the titular app, it may be too little, too late. Senators already had the chance to throw their votes behind TikTok, and for whatever reason, most of them chose not to. How many people who passed the ban will come to regret that decision?