House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban app

The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the wildly popular video app or face it being banned in the United States. The move escalates a standoff between Beijing and Washington over control of technologies that could affect national security, freedom of expression and the social media industry.

Republican leaders quickly moved the bill through the House of Representatives with limited debate, passing it on a 352-65 vote, reflecting broad support for legislation that would directly target China in an election year.

The action came despite TikTok’s efforts to mobilize its 170 million U.S. users against the measure, and despite pressure from the Biden administration to convince lawmakers that Chinese ownership of the platform poses serious national security risks to the United States brings.

The result was a bipartisan coalition behind the measure, including Republicans, who defied former President Donald J. Trump by supporting it, and Democrats, who also backed a bill that President Biden said he would sign.

The bill faces a difficult path to passage in the Senate, where Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has been noncommittal about bringing it to a vote and where some lawmakers have vowed to fight it.

TikTok has been under threat since 2020, with lawmakers increasingly claiming that Beijing’s relationship with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, poses national security risks. The bill aims to let ByteDance sell TikTok to non-Chinese owners within six months. The president would sign the sale if it would solve national security problems. If those sales didn’t happen, the app would be banned.

Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who is among the lawmakers leading the bill, said before the floor vote that it “forces TikTok to break up with the Chinese Communist Party.”

“This is a common sense measure to protect our national security,” he said.

If the bill were to become law, it would likely deepen a cold war between the United States and China over control of key technologies.

On Wednesday, before the vote in the House of Representatives, Beijing condemned pressure from US lawmakers and rejected that TikTok was a danger to the United States. At a daily press conference, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, accused Washington of “resorting to hegemonic moves when it cannot succeed in fair competition.”

Mr. Biden has announced restrictions on how U.S. financial firms can invest in Chinese companies and has restricted the sale of Americans’ sensitive data, such as location and health information, to data brokers that could sell it to China. Platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are blocked in China and Beijing said last year it would oppose the sale of TikTok.

TikTok has said it has gone to great lengths to protect U.S. user data and provide third-party oversight of the platform, and that no government can influence the company’s recommendation model. It has also said there is no evidence that Beijing used TikTok to obtain US user data or influence Americans’ views, two of the claims lawmakers have made.

TikTok urged users last week to call their representatives to protest the bill, in an unusually aggressive move for a tech company. They said: “This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban on TikTok in the United States.”

TikTok has spent more than $1 billion on an elaborate scheme known as Project Texas, which aims to process sensitive U.S. user data separately from the rest of the company’s operations. That plan has been under review for several years by a panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

Two of the lawmakers behind the bill, Mr. Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, said last week that lawmakers acted because CFIUS “has not solved the problem.”

Some experts said that if the bill were to become law, it would likely face First Amendment scrutiny in courts.

“The legal issues will require the production of factual evidence, and that evidence will be weighed against free speech concerns,” said Matt Perault, director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is funding has received. from technology companies, including TikTok and Meta.

He added: “That process looks very different from stamping out things in the political process and op-eds.”

There’s also a chance that even if the bill were to clear Congress, be signed into law, and survive the lawsuits, it could crumble under a new administration. Mr. Trump, who tried to ban TikTok or force its sale in 2020, publicly reversed his position on the app in the past week. In a television appearance on Monday, he said the app was a threat to national security. But he said banning Facebook, a platform he criticized, would help.

“There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without TikTok,” he said.

The Trump administration threatened to remove TikTok from US app stores if ByteDance did not sell its stake in the app. ByteDance even appeared willing to sell a stake in the app to Walmart and Oracle, where executives were close to Mr. Trump.

That plan backfired in federal court. Multiple judges have prevented Trump’s proposed ban from taking effect.

Mr. Biden’s administration has tried to find a legislative solution. The White House provided “technical assistance” to Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Krishnamoorthi as they wrote their bill, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing last week. When the bill was introduced, a spokesperson for the National Security Council quickly called the legislation “an important and welcome step to address the threat of technology that compromises Americans’ sensitive data.”

The administration has repeatedly sent national security officials to Capitol Hill to privately defend the legislation and issue dire warnings about the risks of TikTok’s current ownership. The White House briefed lawmakers before the committee’s 50-0 vote last week sending the bill to the full House.

On Tuesday, officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department spoke to lawmakers in a classified briefing about national security concerns related to TikTok.

Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Krishnamoorthi had previously sponsored a bill to ban TikTok. The latest bill was seen as something of a last stand against the corporation for Mr. Gallagher, who recently said he would not run for a fifth term because “the framers intended for citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then would return to their private lives. lives.”