By The House on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the hugely popular video app or be banned in the United States. The move escalates a showdown between Beijing and Washington over the control of technologies that could affect national security, free speech and the social media industry.
Republican leaders fast-tracked the bill through the House with limited debate, and it passed on a lopsided vote of 352-65, reflecting widespread backing for legislation that would take direct aim at China in an election year.
The action came despite TikTok’s efforts to mobilize its 170 million U.S. users against the measure, and amid the Biden administration’s push to persuade lawmakers that Chinese ownership of the platform poses grave national security risks to the United States.
The result was a bipartisan coalition behind the measure that included Republicans, who defied former President Donald J. Trump in supporting it, and Democrats, who also fell in line behind a bill that President Biden has said he would sign.
The bill faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate, where Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has been noncommittal about bringing it to the floor for a vote and where some lawmakers have vowed to fight it.
TikTok has been under threat since 2020, with lawmakers increasingly arguing that Beijing’s relationship with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, raises national security risks. The bill is aimed at getting ByteDance to sell TikTok to non-Chinese owners within six months. The president would sign off on the sale if it resolved national security concerns. If that sale did not happen, the app would be banned.
Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who is among the lawmakers leading the bill, said on the floor before the 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 the control of important technologies.
On Wednesday, before the House vote, Beijing condemned the push by U.S. lawmakers and rejected that TikTok was a danger to the United States. At a daily press briefing, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, accused Washington of “resorting to hegemonic moves when one could not succeed in fair competition.”
Mr. Biden has announced limitations on how American financial firms can invest in Chinese companies and restricted the sale of Americans’ sensitive data like location and health information to data brokers that could sell it to China. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube are blocked in China, and Beijing said last year that it would oppose a sale of TikTok.
TikTok has said that 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 proof that Beijing has used TikTok to obtain U.S. user data or to influence Americans’ views, two of the claims lawmakers have made.
TikTok prompted users to call their representatives last week to protest the bill in an unusually aggressive move for a technology company, saying: “This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States.”
TikTok has spent more than $1 billion on an extensive plan known as Project Texas that aims to handle sensitive U.S. user data separately from the rest of the company’s operations. That plan has been under review by a panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, for several years.
Two of the lawmakers behind the bill, Mr. Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, said last week that lawmakers were acting because CFIUS “hasn’t solved the problem.”
Some experts said that if the bill were to become law, it would probably face First Amendment scrutiny in courts.
“The legal issues will require a production of actual evidence, and that evidence will be weighed against free expression concerns,” said Matt Perault, the director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has received funding from tech companies including TikTok and Meta.
He added, “That process looks really different than hashing stuff out in the political process and op-eds.”
There’s also a chance that even if the law were to clear Congress, be signed into law and survive court challenges, 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 over the past week. In a Monday television appearance, he said the app was a national security threat. But he said banning the platform would help Facebook, a platform he criticized.
“There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s administration threatened to remove TikTok from American app stores if ByteDance did not sell its share in the app. ByteDance even seemed ready to sell a stake in the app to Walmart and Oracle, where executives were close to Mr. Trump.
That plan went awry in federal court. Multiple judges stopped Mr. Trump’s proposed ban from taking effect.
Mr. Biden’s administration has tried turning to 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 National Security Council spokesman quickly called the legislation “an important and welcome step to address” the threat of technology that imperils Americans’ sensitive data.
The administration has repeatedly sent national security officials to Capitol Hill to privately make the case for the legislation and offer dire warnings on the risks of TikTok’s current ownership. The White House briefed lawmakers before the 50-0 committee vote last week that advanced 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 with lawmakers in a classified briefing about national security concerns tied to TikTok.
Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Krishnamoorthi had previously sponsored a bill aimed at banning TikTok. The latest bill has been viewed as something of a last stand against the company for Mr. Gallagher, who recently said he would not run for a fifth term because “the framers intended citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then return to their private lives.”
