House passes bill that could lead to US ban of TikTok

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called on Senate lawmakers to take "swift action" on the TikTok bill just passed by the House.

"We want to see the Senate take swift action,” Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One Wednesday en route to Wisconsin.

President Joe Biden has previously come out in support of the bill, saying he would sign it if it reached his desk.

Jean-Pierre added that the White House does not expect the bill to affect the US-China relationship, even as Chinese officials warned this week that passage of the legislation would "backfire" on the United States.

"We are going to continue our work, you know, working with our relationship with China," Jean-Pierre said. "That’s not going to stop. But the president has always been clear, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has always been clear: When it comes to our national security, when it comes to data that’s coming from Americans, we’re always going to make sure that we’re addressing those threats that we face.”

One potential stumbling block to a TikTok sale is that the market for social media services is highly concentrated, antitrust experts say.

That could make it hard for TikTok to find a buyer that US competition regulators could accept.

All four of those tech giants have come under tremendous antitrust scrutiny in recent years, with the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission suing each of them for alleged violations of US competition law.

Both federal agencies have made a point of identifying ways that troves of personal data can give the largest tech platforms an anticompetitive edge.

TikTok could have an easier path selling to a company that hasn't raised red flags with antitrust regulators, Kimmelman added.

With the passage of the TikTok bill in the House on Wednesday, this is the closest the United States has come to banning the social media platform on personal devices.

The next closest thing would be a Montana law that bans TikTok on personal devices within the state. That legislation would have taken effect on Jan. 1, but a federal judge blocked it from taking effect late last year.

The Montana law likely violates the First Amendment, wrote District Judge Donald Malloy at the time. The same decision highlighted a debate about whether Montana was impermissibly engaging in foreign policy, a job that is reserved for the federal government.

In a statement on Wednesday’s vote, TikTok said its attention would now shift to the Senate, where the fate of the legislation is unclear.

After the House's dizzyingly fast passage of a bill that seemed to take TikTok by surprise, the company has more of an opportunity to block the legislation in the Senate.

The 2024 election could make it difficult to pass legislation, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, one of the bill's architects, acknowledged to reporters Wednesday.

Even so, Gallant wrote, senators could try to tuck the bill into a must-pass defense spending bill toward the end of the year, after the election.

"We continue to see passage of a TikTok ban bill in 2024 as more likely than not," Gallant wrote. "That would set the stage for a one to two year court fight on First Amendment grounds."

Earlier Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said only that the chamber would review the House bill when it reaches his chamber.

President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill if it makes it to his desk.

Kahlil Greene, a self-described "Gen Z historian" whose TikTok videos on Black history reach more than 640,000 followers, told CNN Wednesday that the House vote carries echoes of some of the darkest times in the country's past.

In an interview, Greene compared the effort to clamp down on a foreign-owned app to the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw a wide range of Americans fall under government suspicion amid fears of communist infiltration.

The US government has not been persuasive enough about the need for restrictions specifically targeting TikTok, Greene said, and has not formulated a solution that protects Americans' constitutional rights.

"I’m really concerned with the government banning TikTok, especially in an election year," he said, "and also hypocritically, especially when they are using it so much and are continuing to use it for their campaign purposes. It’s like, ‘TikTok can be used when it benefits the American government, but when it starts creating dissent, and novel public opinion around issues that have been set in stone in American politics, then it becomes a problem.’ That’s my concern."

House lawmakers are divided on the value of a classified briefing held this week intended to get them up to speed on TikTok's alleged national security risks.

“I went to the briefing yesterday, the top secret briefing, it was vacuous," said California Republican Rep. John Duarte, who voted against the bill today.. "There was no specific information given in that briefing that was well founded evidence and specific about what TikTok or anybody else was doing."

Michigan Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee, who voted for the bill, described it as a judgment call.

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, one of the bill's original leading cosponsors, acknowledged some uncertainty surrounding the legislation's future in the Senate.

“Obviously with the Senate, you know, that’s 100 senators that are going to have an opinion on this thing,” Gallagher said. “So obviously, you’ve got to balance that against the need to do something expeditiously. Because everything gets harder the closer you get to an election.”

Former President Donald Trump's public opposition to a TikTok ban may have swayed some House Republicans, according to one GOP lawmaker who voted for the bill.

What other Republicans are saying: Earlier Wednesday, GOP Reps. Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene both told CNN that their decision to vote against the TikTok bill was not because Trump signaled his opposition. 

Greene told CNN that she didn’t speak to Trump about the bill and voted against it based on her own conclusions, saying, “He has his opinion on the bill and he can voice it. It doesn’t mean that we’re all robots.” 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a statement after the House passed its bill that could ban TikTok. He remained uncommitted to the next steps in the Senate.

He would not specifically lay out what the next steps would be when asked yesterday. But that was before the vote passed in the House. 

If you’re a TikTok fanatic worried about how you’re going to stay connected to the world after a bill that could ban the app passed the House of Representatives Wednesday … don’t panic just yet.

Many of the roughly 170 million Americans who use the app have raised concerns that banning TikTok could mean doing away with a platform that represents much more than a platform where young people can follow the latest updates about the Princess of Wales.

It’s where they go to find connection, get entertained, seek information and earn a living. Some of those TikTokkers phoned their representatives in recent days to urge them to vote “no” on the bill, after the app alerted users to the potential ban.

There are other platforms available for TikTok users — nearly every major social media company has spent the past several years trying to mimic the app’s popular formula of snappy, shortform videos combined with a powerful recommendation algorithm that keeps users scrolling. However, shifting a loyal audience from one platform to another is easier said than done.

But TikTok will not be disappearing from Americans’ phones anytime soon.

The bill faces numerous hurdles to being signed into law and will almost certainly face legal challenges if it is. And if the bill becomes law, the question remains whether an American buyer would step in to save the day (if ByteDance is willing to divest the popular platform).

Read more about how likely it is that the bill could become law here.