Progress on TikTok Bill is Slowing in the Senate

After a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a nationwide ban advanced rapidly through the House of Representatives this week, its progress in the Senate has slowed.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader who determines which legislation comes to a vote, has not yet decided whether he will bring the bill to the floor, his spokesman said. Senators — some of whom have their own versions of bills targeting TikTok — will need convincing. Other runway legislation could be prioritized. And the process of passing the House bill and possibly rewriting it to suit the Senate can be time-consuming.

Many in the Senate are keeping their cards close to their vests about what they would do with the TikTok measure, even as they said they recognized that the House sent a strong message with its vote on the bill, which passed 352-65. was hired. orders TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell its stake in the app within six months or face a ban.

“The lesson of the vote in the House of Representatives is that this issue can arise almost spontaneously because of the support it has,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview Friday. He said adjustments could be made to the bill, but there was bipartisan support for wresting the app from Chinese ownership.

The Senate delay means TikTok will likely face weeks or even months of uncertainty about its fate in the United States. That could result in continued lobbying, in addition to maneuvering by the White House, the Chinese government and ByteDance. It will also likely spark potential talk of deals — real or imagined — while uncertainty about losing access to the app will continue to hang over the heads of TikTok creators and its 170 million U.S. users.

“Almost everything will slow down in the Senate,” said Nu Wexler, a former Senate aide who worked for Google, Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “They will need some time to massage egos or reach consensus.”

The House of Representatives passed the legislation just over a week after it was introduced and passed it with bipartisan support amid concerns the app could compromise U.S. users’ data or be used as a Chinese propaganda tool . The bill also received support from the White House. After saying last week that he opposed the legislation, former President Donald J. Trump said he now supported it in an interview with Fox News on Friday.

The bill has angered China, with one official saying the United States had “never found any evidence that TikTok posed a threat to U.S. national security.” Beijing could take action to block a sale if the legislation passes. Some lawmakers are concerned that the bill could overstep Congress’ mandate by specifically mentioning TikTok, which would violate a constitutional ban on targeting individuals. And TikTok has argued that the secret drafting of the bill and the speed with which it passed in the House of Representatives indicated that lawmakers were aiming for a ban rather than a sale.

TikTok, which has repeatedly said it has not shared data with the Chinese government nor will it allow any government to influence its algorithmic recommendations, has scrambled to respond to the bill, which took the company by surprise.

On Wednesday, Shou Chew, TikTok’s Singaporean CEO, posted a video addressing users, saying a ban on the service would hurt small businesses in the United States. He urged them to call their senators and fight back. (The company did the same with representatives of the House of Representatives last week.)

TikTok has spent more than $1 billion on an elaborate scheme known as Project Texas — due to its partnership with Austin-based Oracle — that aims to process sensitive U.S. user data separately from the rest of the company’s operations. The plan also provides for independent and government oversight of the platform to check for manipulation.

On Friday, searching for “KeepTikTok” on the app yielded a banner asking Americans to “Tell your senator how important TikTok is to you.” The message asked users to enter their zip code and then informed them of the correct lawmaker to call.

“We continue to educate members of our community about the rushed ban bill, how it would trample on their constitutional right to free speech, and how they can make their voices heard,” Alex Haurek, a TikTok spokesperson, said in a statement.

Senate offices have received hundreds of calls and voicemail messages about the bill from TikTok users in recent days, said two Senate aides, who were not authorized to discuss the calls publicly. The aides said many of the calls appeared to be from minors.

The White House is also lobbying behind the scenes, surprising some talent agencies representing TikTok creators on Friday by inviting them to a briefing “on the ownership of social media platforms,” according to an email received by two attendees, who spoke on condition of anonymity. because the conversation was off-the-record.

John F. Kirby, a national security communications adviser to the president, emphasized that the White House was seeking a TikTok divestiture to a group of representatives from talent agencies such as CAA and Viral Nation, the attendees said. There were several questions about how the agencies’ clients and their jobs would be affected by the legislation, they said. A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the call.

Congressional experts said the Senate would likely be harder to crack because the smaller number of individual members would be more likely to try to put their own stamp on legislation. A single member who objects to a measure can make it difficult to speed up the legislation. And the country must also consider and pass a major package of spending bills before the deadline for a partial government shutdown.

“I think senators will do their due diligence,” said Lindsay Gorman, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “There will be a rigorous conversation about exactly this question: whether we just need to move or whether there is room to tinker.”

Some senators have expressed support for the bill. Intelligence Committee leaders Senators Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said in a statement Wednesday that they would support the bill moving forward in the Senate.

Mr. Warner, who also has his own TikTok proposal, said Wednesday that he was still asking questions about several elements of the bill but was welcomed by the momentum it brought out of the House.

“There are a lot of bases that need to be touched,” Mr. Warner said. But, he added, it was “difficult to think of anything else that has received more than 350 votes in a House that is otherwise not fully functioning.”

Others have been more cautious. Mr. Blumenthal said in the interview that the Senate needed to review certain aspects of the bill, adding that a six-month deadline to reach a sales agreement may not be long enough.

He also said he had “heard about some very credible and prominent groups” that were interested in buying TikTok but had not yet appeared in the press.

“There is a clear path to achieving all the interests here – keeping TikTok, but simply transferring it into other hands,” he added.

Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington and chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, will likely influence whether the House legislation gets a vote in the Senate. She said last year that she was drafting her own legislation to address TikTok, and was noncommittal about whether she would support a House vote on the legislation. She said in a statement after it passed the House of Representatives that she planned to work with colleagues to “try to find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties.”

A spokeswoman for the Trade Committee declined to make Ms. Cantwell available for an interview.