Inside America’s stand against TikTok

Earlier this month, the video app TikTok started sending urgent push notifications to its 170 million American users. ‘Congress is planning a total ban of TikTok,’ it said. ‘Speak up now.’ The company called on TikTokers to defend their ‘constitutional right to free expression’ and provided a handy link so that ‘businesses, creators and artists’ could all contact their representatives directly and urge them to vote down the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

An army of angsty teens was activated but the effort backfired. Many kids got carried away, screaming out death and rape threats, and that underlined the point which elected officials behind the bill wanted to make: that TikTok, ultimately controlled as it is by the Communist party of China, is brainwashing children and dangerously out of control.

Ten days ago, the act, which would force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its US entity within six months, sailed through the House by a margin of 352-65. It duly moves to the Senate, and so it’s now US senators on the receiving end of the irate calls.

‘The fact TikTok is urging school-aged children to call our offices while they are sitting in a classroom is another example of how China uses this company to harm our country and a good example of why Chinese Communist party-controlled ByteDance should be forced to sell TikTok,’ Senator Marco Rubio told The Spectator.

Rubio and other supporters of the legislation insist that it is not a ban, even if several members of Congress called it that when the bill was first introduced at the beginning of March. ‘The bill isn’t a ban of anything,’ says Congressman Tim Walberg, who sits on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.