TikTok spent days directing its users to call their Members of Congress but that effort seems to have failed, at least so far. Today a bill that would force the Chinese owner of TikTok to either sell it or face a ban in the US passed the House with strong bipartisan support.
Republican leaders fast-tracked the bill through the House with limited debate, and it passed on a lopsided vote of 352-65, reflecting widespread backing for legislation that would take direct aim at China in an election year.
The action came despite TikTok’s efforts to mobilize its 170 million U.S. users against the measure, and amid the Biden administration’s push to persuade lawmakers that Chinese ownership of the platform poses grave national security risks to the United States…
Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who is among the lawmakers leading the bill, said on the floor before the vote that it “forces TikTok to break up with the Chinese Communist Party.”
“This is a common-sense measure to protect our national security,” he said.
President Biden has said he would sign the bill so the only hurdle left is the Senate. And it sounds like that is going to be a long, slow process. Sen. Schumer hasn’t committed to bring the bill up for a vote at all.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was noncommittal on whether the Senate would vote on the House bill, telling reporters on Tuesday, “I’ll have to consult, and intend to consult, with my relevant committee chairmen to see what their views would be.”…
Another key chair, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who leads the Senate Commerce Committee, said, “I’m not sure what we’ll do yet, got to talk to lots of people.”
“The whole point here is you have a dilemma,” Cantwell said. “You want free speech, but you also want the United States to have some ability to protect US citizens or U.S. military from foreign actors who might be deleterious in what they would be using as a tool of communication…
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill, the Judiciary Committee chair, acknowledged that a ban on TikTok may not be politically beneficial for President Joe Biden’s re-election in November…
“Cutting out a large group of young voters is not the best-known strategy for reelection,” Durbin said.
Even Republicans in the Senate don’t seem to care about capturing the current momentum. Sen. Cornyn of Texas told NBC, “We do things slowly over here, and this takes time.” Meanwhile, China is arguing that the US doesn’t have any proof China is up to no good with TikTok:
China on Wednesday condemned U.S. lawmakers’ push to force the Chinese parent company of TikTok to sell the popular short video platform…
“In recent years, though the United States has never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to U.S. national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok,” said Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, during a daily press briefing.
China wants to play the game that all dictators love to play. The game is called ‘you can’t prove I did X‘ and the idea is that every decision to act must be backed up by something like the kind of ironclad case you would need in a court of law. So long as the dictator has been careful enough not to leave fingerprints on his own bad behavior the idea is, well…it’s like something out of the OJ trial: If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit. Russia has been playing this same game with the death of Alexei Navalny.
And of course this would make sense in a case where we’re talking about potentially adding sanctions or even lobbing missiles at someone. You don’t want to do those things without a very clear and convincing reason. But TikTok is in a different category. We don’t need specific evidence of China’s misbehavior to shut down TikTok. On the contrary, the underlying problem here is obvious when you look at it in cost vs benefit terms. Here’s how Matt Yglesias put it on his Substack site:
Here’s the analogy I like to use. It’s 1975 and a state-owned Soviet firm wants to buy CBS. What happens? Well, what happens is they wouldn’t be allowed to. The FCC would block it. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US or its predecessors would block it. If they didn’t have the power, congress would write a new law. And even if it wasn’t CBS, if it was a chain of local TV affiliate stations, the outcome would be the same. There would be no detailed factual analysis or demand for gold standard evidence that a Soviet-owned television statement might do Moscow’s bidding or that television is capable of influencing public opinion. We’d reject the idea out of hand. And rightly so, because the downsides would be very clear, and the upside minimal…
…we don’t need to wait for open and shut evidence that the platform is being censored or used to deliberately promote propaganda. We should just have a very strong presumption that it will be used in the way and act accordingly. After all, we don’t know what skirmishes with Taiwan or India or Vietnam lie in the future or what topics the PRC may want to throw its weight around on. We want to try to maintain the economic benefits of ongoing commerce with China while minimizing the risks to the American information environment. And TikTok fails that cost-benefit analysis.
What is the upside of TikTok anyway? It’s a timewaster which is probably (almost certainly) contributing to a sense of anxiety and stress among children who use it, especially teen girls. There’s a halfway decent case to ban it even without the problems associated with Chinese ownership. So there’s really no downside to this current bill. The worst case is that China will kill it rather than sell it and…so what? Users can migrate to Instagram or YouTube or, better yet, just find something else to do with their time.
The fact that Senate Democrats are slow walking this and worrying about its impact on Joe Biden is an embarrassment. There is no good reason to let China own a significant part of the digital public square in the US, especially when China doesn’t allow US-owned apps like Twitter to operate inside their borders. Send these whiny hypocrites packing. We don’t need lectures about the First Amendment from the one-party communists in China. This really should be an easy call even for the dunces in the US Senate.
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