The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill this week that would force TikTok to divest from China and sell to an American buyer or cease operations in the United States. It now heads to the Senate, where its future is uncertain as a growing number of lawmakers in both chambers of Congress raise concerns about the implications of a forced sale and about the bill itself.
Some of these concerns are legitimate, some are not. The argument that the bill would squash free speech rights, for example, is nonsense. There is no free speech right that allows a company to operate in tandem with our nation’s top adversary to collect and store data from American users. TikTokers can and will be allowed to use the platform and post whatever they want — this bill does not so much as suggest otherwise. It just would ensure TikTok can’t operate as a front for the Chinese Communist Party.
The argument that TikTok is not a spy tool for the CCP is also nonsense. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) tried to make the case on Thursday that concerns about TikTok’s ties to China are overblown and that its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, is largely run by a group of international investors, not CCP stooges. But the fact remains that ByteDance is based in and operates out of China, making it subject to Chinese intelligence law, which requires companies to hand over data to the government upon request. The fact that China’s own foreign ministry has come out hard against this bill is enough to prove the connection.
Concerns that the bill may be too broad, on the other hand, are understandable. It would not just force TikTok to divest from ByteDance, but all future companies “controlled by a foreign adversary.” According to the bill, the president would have the authority to determine whether a company falls under this designation but would be required to explain the determination to Congress and describe to lawmakers “the specific national security concern involved” and provide “a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.” And, as National Review’s Jeff Blehar pointed out, the president would also be restricted to the statutory definition of a “foreign adversary,” which includes China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
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Given the executive branch’s routine abuse of its already-existing authority to describe people and ideas it dislikes as “foreign threats” — former President Donald Trump was a Russian asset until he wasn’t — it is entirely legitimate to worry about government overreach here. Does the bill include certain checks to prevent such abuse? Yes. Will government officials still do their best to push back against those checks? Yes.
A better bill would focus solely on the TikTok threat. And it would do more to protect Americans’ data from adversaries such as China, which, even if it loses access to TikTok, can still buy that data elsewhere. If both sides of the aisle are as concerned about this matter as they claim to be, then these are changes all lawmakers should be able to get behind.