Last week, a bipartisan group of House Members introduced a bill to force ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the popular video app to a buyer from the United States or another friendly country.
TikTok fought back. It began sending its users pop-ups urging them to “take action” against a “TikTok shutdown.” (In fact, the bill would not shut down TikTok, but merely require it to be sold to a buyer from a friendly country.)
TikTok users, including minor children, flooded Congress with calls. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) recounted that some of these children called the office and said “‘What is a congressman? What is Congress?’ They had no idea what was going on.”
The incident proved what many have long feared: TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company and thus ultimately subject to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), can mobilize its young users to generate political effects in the United States.
On Wednesday, the House approved the bill by an overwhelming bipartisan vote. President Biden has promised to sign it. Now action shifts to the Senate, where the bill’s fate is uncertain.
TikTok is a Powerful Weapon in CCP Hands
Military leaders have warned that the U.S. and China may go to war this decade. If that happens, what would the CCP order TikTok to do?
Spread videos of American troops under fire to demoralize our population?
Serve military reservists videos urging them not to report for duty? (With the vast data it harvests from users, TikTok can easily identify American troops who use the app.)
Promote videos encouraging young Americans to hold antiwar protests at military bases in the United States?
Another concern is TikTok’s extensive data harvesting: the app collects vast amounts of personal data about its American users. That data can then be accessed by Beijing-based employees who answer to the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP can use the data to blackmail Americans, target cyberattacks against our industries, and more.
The bottom line: TikTok’s reach, influence, and data are too powerful to be in the hands of our most dangerous geopolitical rival.
The TikTok Bill is Constitutional
One key question facing Senators: is it legal? Some in Congress claim that forcing a sale of TikTok would violate the Constitution.
It would not. The House bill rests on longstanding judicial precedent. And it is amply supported by a detailed legislative record laying out the risks TikTok poses to American security.
First, and most importantly: The bill would not abridge Americans’ First Amendment rights to make, share, or watch videos of their choosing. It does not empower anyone to censor Americans’ speech.
Nor would the bill prevent Americans from watching foreign content if they wish—including content produced by the Chinese Communist Party. The bill would simply prevent hostile foreign powers from owning the channels by which Americans share and watch those videos.
Indeed, Americans who like TikTok can keep using the app under its new ownership. Or they can share and watch the very same videos on YouTube, X, Instagram, or other platforms not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
The bill also contains a strong backstop to protect Americans’ rights: it cannot be enforced against American citizens. To make doubly sure, the text explicitly bars the Attorney General from taking any enforcement action under the bill against individual Americans.
Second: Foreign powers have no constitutional right to own communications networks in the United States.
Federal law has long banned foreign ownership of broadcast TV and radio stations. And a federal appeals court has rejected the claim that this unconstitutionally discriminates against foreign owners.
Third: The TikTok bill is not an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.”
A bill of attainder is a law that singles out named people or entities for legislative punishment. But not all laws that name a specific entity are bills of attainder. The Supreme Court has held that Congress can single out “a legitimate class of one” where the purpose is not to punish past acts but to address present risks and protect against future harms.
That is precisely what Congress is doing here. Before passing the TikTok bill, the House adopted a joint resolution explaining why Congress has judged that TikTok can no longer be owned by a foreign adversary. The joint resolution described TikTok’s “vast” data collection; the Chinese Communist Party’s control over TikTok; the risk that adversary control of social media data poses to national security; and the inadequacy of TikTok’s attempts to mitigate that risk.
That legislative record amply supports Congress’s judgment that this bill is needed to protect national security. The law’s purpose is to protect our nation against present and future espionage and subversion by the Chinese Communist Party, not to punish ByteDance for past acts. Nor does the law apply only to TikTok: it applies the same rules to other social-media apps from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
Congress Can Address TikTok and Deal with Misdeeds by Other Tech Companies
Former President Trump has objected that banning TikTok will help Instagram, which is owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. Making existing tech monopolies more powerful would indeed be bad for markets and for our freedom to think, create, and speak freely. For that reason, antitrust officials should not (and, we can safely assume, will not) allow Meta or Google to buy TikTok in a forced sale.
More likely, TikTok will land with an American buyer outside the current social-media oligopoly. The result would not be to entrench Instagram, but to give it a powerful new American competitor.
Other conservatives have argued that Congress should train its fire not on TikTok, but on Google and other American tech companies that have censored conservative speech and injected political dogma into AI products like Google’s Gemini.
Yes, those are urgent issues that Congress cannot ignore. But they are not reasons to let TikTok off the hook.
Congress can and should do both. Deal with the CCP threat now while the window of opportunity is open. And keep the heat on American tech companies that use their monopoly power to distort history and push a political agenda.
These calls for Congress to regulate American tech companies also unintentionally illustrate why putting TikTok under friendly ownership is so vital. Congress can investigate and regulate Google and Meta because those companies are based in the United States. They ultimately answer to American law and the elected officials who make and enforce it.
ByteDance, on the other hand, answers to the Chinese Communist Party, not the U.S. government. For that reason, Congress has struggled to get straight answers from TikTok executives at public hearings. Only ByteDance knows the truth, and its masters are in Beijing.
The Golden Rule
It is telling that China does not allow American social networks to operate there. The CCP does not want American companies harvesting their data and influencing their youth.
What do they know that we don’t?
TikTok should be owned by Americans. Pass the House bill and make ByteDance sell.
Adam Klein is Director of the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses on national security law, intelligence, and counterterrorism.
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