The app has been under threat since 2020, but Wednesday’s vote was the first time a measure that could widely ban TikTok for consumers was approved by a full chamber of Congress, says The New York Times.
"In a capital where Republicans and Democrats agree on virtually nothing, it was notable when the House overwhelmingly declared on Wednesday that TikTok poses such a grave risk to national security that it must be forced to sell its U.S. operations to a non-Chinese owner," says a separate Times analysis.
Written with “technical assistance” from the White House by Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., the top lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the bill was approved 50-0 by the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Private briefings from national security and law enforcement officials, including a classified hearing last week, were a “call to action” for Congress to “finally” take a stand against TikTok, says Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., a member of the Energy and Commerce panel.
Lawmakers in both parties have long voiced concerns that the social media video app, which is owned by China-based ByteDance and has more than 170 million American users, could be a threat to national security and could be used by the Chinese government to spy on Americans or spread disinformation to further China's agenda.
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 U.S. national security concerns. If the sale didn't happen, the app would be banned.
TikTok has spent more than $1 billion on an extensive plan known as Project Texas that’s intended to handle sensitive U.S. user data separately from the rest of the company’s operations, the Times says.
The Times analysis says there’s a deeper TikTok security problem, which the legislation doesn’t fully address: It's become clear that the security threat posed by TikTok has far less to do with who owns it than it does with who writes the code and algorithms that make TikTok tick.
Those algorithms, which guide the way TikTok watches its users and feeds them more of what they want, are the "magic sauce" of the app, the Times says.
But TikTok doesn’t own the algorithms. They’re developed by engineers who work for its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which assembles the code in "great secrecy" in its software labs, in Beijing, Singapore and Mountain View, Calif., according to the Times.
China has issued regulations that appear designed to require government review before any of ByteDance’s algorithms could be licensed to outsiders, the Times says.
"Few expect those licenses to be issued — meaning that selling TikTok to an American owner without the underlying code might be like selling a Ferrari without its famed engine," says the Times.
"The bill would require a new, Western-owned TikTok to be cut off from any 'operational relationship' with ByteDance, 'including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm,'" says the Times.
"So the new, American-based company would have to develop its own, made-in-America algorithm," says the Times. "Maybe that would work, or maybe it would flop. But a version of TikTok without its classic algorithm might quickly become useless to users and worthless to investors."
If the were to become law and TikTok is ultimately banned, experts say the unprecedented move would undoubtedly prompt legal challenges from free-speech advocates, the tech industry and others, especially in the absence of any direct evidence showing Chinese government ties or surveillance, CNET reports.
Free speech and digital rights groups, as well as some security experts, long have opposed the idea of a ban, saying that singling out TikTok wouldn’t do anything to solve the broader problems with social media as a whole, CNET says. They say lawmakers would be better off passing comprehensive digital privacy laws that would protect the personal information of Americans by stopping all social media companies from collecting it and selling it to data brokers.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is noncommittal about the path the bill could take there, says The Verge. "The Senate will review the legislation when it comes over from the House," he says.
President Biden says he would sign the bill.