New Bill Seeks to Force ByteDance to Divest TikTok

‘America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States,” says Rep. Mike Gallagher.

The TikTok logo is displayed outside a TikTok office in Culver City, Calif., on Aug. 27, 2020. Mario Tama/Getty Images

A new bill would ban the TikTok social media app in the United States unless its Chinese-owned parent company divests.

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would ban app stores from making TikTok available and bar U.S.-based web hosting services in the United States from hosting other applications created by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.

The legal mechanism used to do this would be Title 10 of the United States Code, which Congress would leverage to list ByteDance as being subject to the control of a foreign adversary.

The bill was introduced to the House on March 5 by 19 members of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including Chair Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.).

“This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users,” Mr. Gallagher said in a prepared statement.

“TikTok’s time in the United States is over unless it ends its relationship with CCP-controlled ByteDance.”

The bipartisan legislation was co-sponsored by nine other Democrats and eight Republicans.

It is unclear what chance it has to pass the House as a whole, where legislators may be reluctant to come to loggerheads with one of the world’s largest social media giants. Efforts to accomplish similar ends in the previous two congressional sessions have failed.

For its part, TikTok presented the bill as an assault on free speech, saying that the legislation was an attempt to single out the company unfairly. “This bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it,” a TikTok spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

“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.”

Should the bill become a law, it would create a process for the president to classify social media apps under the influence of foreign adversaries as hazards to national security and prohibit them accordingly.

The bill also provides ByteDance with a window of time to divest from TikTok, essentially compelling the company to sell the social media behemoth to a non-China-based company and would not prohibit the company’s products if it complies.

“America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States,” Mr. Gallagher said.

Notably, the bill would also require that users be provided with a copy of their data in a format that can be imported into an alternative social media application.

Security and political risk experts have long warned that TikTok could be weaponized against American citizens through predatory surveillance practices, censorship, and the promotion of state-backed propaganda.

TikTok’s practices regarding the collection of user data have drawn scrutiny in recent years, as has its leadership’s admission that the company previously censored content at the request of the CCP, though TikTok leadership denies that such is still the practice.

ByteDance is believed to have deep ties to the CCP, and its leadership has previously espoused a commitment to creating products in line with the regime’s communist values.

For his part, TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew previously served as the chief financial officer (CFO) for ByteDance and has made a concerted effort to staff TikTok with former ByteDance executives.

Mr. Chew also served as CFO for Xiaomi, a Chinese company that the Trump administration sanctioned for aiding the CCP’s military, though a court ruling ultimately blocked those sanctions.