Khanna explains the opposition to the TikTok bill, while senators signal openness

Rep. Ro Khanna on Sunday laid out his case against a sweeping ban on social media platform TikTok after opposing legislation that was overwhelmingly passed by the House of Representatives last week, while two senators expressed openness to the bill.

“What is the actual evidence that you can’t pass a data privacy law or a law that prohibits sending data abroad and get it done that way?” Mr. Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “The frustration is that we have not been able to pass these data privacy laws. These laws would also cover data brokers who sell data to Chinese companies. This bill doesn’t really solve that problem.”

Fifty Democrats – mostly from the party’s progressive wing – voted against the House bill because they were concerned about violating America’s right to free speech and harming small business owners whose marketing and sales depend on TikTok. The bill passed the House on Wednesday, 352 to 65.

The legislation requires TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its U.S. assets within six months of the bill being signed into law or face an outright ban in the United States. Supporters of the measure worry that the Chinese government will gain access to the data of about 150 million US residents who use the video app and that it will influence public debate in America by tweaking the app’s algorithms to its advantage to fit.

While acknowledging the concerns of TikTok’s critics, Mr. Khanna said on Sunday that the Chinese government’s security threats could be more effectively addressed with “a tailor-made law” that would ban any transfer of Americans’ private data to China and other foreign entities. .

The United States has no federal data privacy law that restricts the sale of personal information, potentially allowing foreign entities to purchase the private information of millions of Americans. Mr. Khanna, whose congressional district includes Silicon Valley, has promised that years will pass a new law that places limits on tech companies’ ability to collect and profit from their users’ data.

While expressing sympathy for calls to ban TikTok, two of Mr. Khanna’s colleagues in the Senate — a Democrat and a Republican — failed to express full support for the House bill on Sunday.

Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was open to supporting the House bill but had not yet made a final decision.

“We’ll see how the Senate wants to take this up,” Mr. Cardin said. “But I would like us to reach the finish line and provide the necessary guardrails.”

Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, partly echoed Mr. Cardin’s sentiments while emphasizing the need for swift action against TikTok.

“I would like to see the final language, but I’m certainly inclined to vote for it,” Mr. Cassidy said. “Anyone who doesn’t think the Chinese Communist Party wants to influence how we think in our country simply doesn’t understand what they are doing.”