NewsRescue
The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the platform or face a nationwide ban. Critics have objected that such a move would open the door to unconstitutional censorship.
The final vote was 352-65, with a total of 197 Republicans and 155 Democrats in favor of the bill and 15 and 50 against, respectively. The bill now goes to the Senate. If it passes, President Joe Biden said he would sign it.
“We have given TikTok a clear choice,” said Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican congresswoman from Washington state. “Separate from your parent company ByteDance, which is beholden to the [Communist Party of China] and remain operational in the United States, or side with the CCP and face the consequences.”
The premise of the ban is that TikTok represents a “national security threat” because ByteDance is a company related to China. Another Republican, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, called the bill “a cure that is worse than the disease.”
Massie has previously argued the bill was a “Trojan horse” that would give the White House the power to ban websites and apps. The owner of X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk agreed, saying the bill is “about censorship and government control!”
Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy also suggested that anyone concerned about Biden’s censorship of political opponents should not provide him “even greater executive authority to do more of it in the name of national security.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) criticised the move for “violating the free speech rights of millions of Americans who use the platform daily to communicate and stay informed.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, the bill’s sponsors, Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher and Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi, collaborated with Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and the White House’s National Security Council to draft the legislation, which garnered Democratic support. The Biden administration also coached lawmakers on how to structure the package to avoid First Amendment litigation.
The WSJ also discovered that the attempt to ban TikTok began after October 7, when Israel’s supporters in Congress and Silicon Valley got “concerned” about what they described as pro-Hamas and “antisemitic” content on the platform.
TikTok spokesman Alex Haurek published a statement following the vote, stating that the law was hurried through as part of a covert procedure.