On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers put forth legislation that mandates China’s ByteDance to divest the popular short video app TikTok within six months or face a U.S. ban. The proposed bill, known as the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, was introduced by Representatives Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois. The legislation cites concerns about national security due to TikTok’s Chinese ownership, alleging that the Beijing-based company collects data from American users and poses a risk to national security. Additionally, it accuses the company of collaborating with the Communist Party.
ByteDance, which has more than 150 million active users in the United States, has resisted calls for it to sell the app or be banned in the country. It has pushed back against the claims by saying that it takes data protection seriously and only collects data necessary for the app to operate correctly. It has offered to add further protections and said it won’t turn over user data to China or other third parties. But those efforts have failed to assuage security officials’ concerns.
The bill would require the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which conducts national security reviews of foreign investments, to decide whether ByteDance should divest. According to the Wall Street Journal, if it doesn’t, the company should be blocked from operating in the United States. The new law has more than a dozen cosponsors and includes members from both parties, including top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and ranking Democrat Ed Royce.
The measure is the first legislative move in nearly a year toward banning or forcing ByteDance to divest from TikTok. A senate bill to ban the app stalled in Congress last year in the face of heavy lobbying by TikTok and other tech companies. But the issue could resurface in the wake of the recent report that Chinese government-backed hackers targeted the emails of Democratic leaders.
The new bill comes after two years of talks between ByteDance and the U.S. government about adding new safeguards to the app, but none have assuaged lawmakers’ concerns. They worry that no matter how well the company tries to protect its American users, its roots in China will remain a source of anxiety about its data practice; experts say that even selling the app to a U.S. company wouldn’t solve those concerns because it would still have to comply data security it rules set by the government. And any such changes would likely be challenged in court by privacy advocates. Moreover, some cybersecurity experts argue that if the goal is to protect American privacy, policymakers should instead push for basic laws preventing tech companies from collecting so much sensitive data about people in the first place. Then, they wouldn’t need to resort to xenophobic showboating over a specific app.
