Global Courant
WASHINGTON — The young voices in the messages leaving North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis laughed, but the words were ominous.
“Okay, listen, if you ban TikTok, I will find you and shoot you,” someone said, giggling and talking over other young voices in the background. “I’ll shoot you, find you and cut you up.” Another threatened to kill Tillis and then commit suicide.
Tillis’ office says it has received about 1,000 calls about TikTok since the House passed legislation this month that would ban the popular app if its China-based owner does not sell its stake. TikTok has urged its users – many of whom are young – to call their representatives and even provide an easy link to the phone numbers. “The government will take away the community you and millions of other Americans love,” read a pop-up message from the company when users opened the app.
Tillis, who supports the House of Representatives bill, has filed a police report. “What I hated about that was that it shows the enormous influence that social media platforms have on young people,” he said in an interview.
Although more aggressive than most, TikTok’s extensive lobbying campaign is the tech industry’s latest attempt to head off new legislation — and it’s a fight the industry tends to win. For years, Congress has failed to act on bills that would, among other things, protect user privacy, protect children from online threats, make companies more accountable for their content and place loose guardrails around artificial intelligence.
“I mean, it’s almost embarrassing,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., a former technology executive who also supports the TikTok bill and has long tried to push his colleagues to regulate the industry. “I would hate to see us maintain our perfect zero batting average in technical law.”
For now, some see the TikTok bill as the best chance to regulate the tech industry and set a precedent, if only one company is involved. President Joe Biden has said he would sign the House bill, which passed this month by an overwhelming 362-65 vote after a rare 50-0 committee vote brought the proposal to the floor.
But it is already facing obstacles in the Senate, where there is little unanimity on the best approach to ensuring that China does not access private data of the app’s 170 million US users or influence them through its algorithms.
Other factors are holding the Senate back. The technology industry is broad and falls under the jurisdiction of several committees. Moreover, the issues at play don’t fall squarely on partisan lines, making it harder for lawmakers to agree on priorities and how legislation should be written. Senate Commerce Committee Chairwoman Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., has so far been reluctant to embrace the TikTok bill, first calling for hearings and suggesting the Senate might want to rewrite it.
“We’re going through a process,” Cantwell said. “It’s important to get it right.”
Warner, on the other hand, says the House bill is the House’s best chance to get something done after years of inaction. And he says the threatening calls from young people are a good example of why the legislation is needed: “It makes it clear: do we really want this kind of messaging to be able to be manipulated by the Communist Party of China?”
Some lawmakers worry that blocking TikTok could anger millions of young people who use the app, a crucial segment of voters in the November election. But Warner says “the debate has shifted” from talk of an outright ban a year ago to the House bill that would force TikTok, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese tech company ByteDance Ltd., to sell its stake so the app could continue to function.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in a television interview that aired Sunday, acknowledged the app’s popularity and how it has become an income stream for many people. She said the government has no intention of banning TikTok but instead cracking down on its ownership. “We understand the purpose and the usefulness of it and the joy it brings to a lot of people,” Harris told ABC’s “This Week.”
Republicans are divided. While most of them support the TikTok legislation, others are wary of over-regulation and the government targeting one specific entity.
“The passage of the House TikTok ban is not just a misguided overreach; it is a draconian measure that stifles free speech, tramples constitutional rights, and disrupts the economic pursuits of millions of Americans,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Hoping to convince their colleagues to support the bill, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee have called on the intelligence community to release information about TikTok and China’s ownership that has been provided to senators in classified briefings to give.
“It is critical that the American people, and especially TikTok users, understand the national security issues at stake,” the senators said in a joint statement.
Blumenthal and Blackburn have separate legislation they have been working on for several years aimed at protecting children’s online safety, but the Senate has yet to vote on it. Efforts to regulate online privacy have also stalled, as has legislation to make tech companies more accountable for the content they publish.
And an effort by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, DY, to quickly introduce legislation that would regulate the fast-growing artificial intelligence industry has not yet yielded any results.
Schumer has said very little about the TikTok bill, including whether he might bring it to the Senate floor.
“The Senate will review the legislation as it comes out of the House,” was all he would say after the House passed the bill.
Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican who has worked with Schumer on artificial intelligence, says he thinks the Senate could ultimately pass a TikTok bill, even if it is a different version. He says the classified briefings have “convinced the vast majority of members” that they need to pay attention to the app’s data collection and TikTok’s ability to spread misinformation to users.
“I think it’s a clear danger to our country if we don’t do anything,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be done in two weeks, but it has to be done.”
Rounds says he and Schumer also continue to hold regular meetings about artificial intelligence, and will soon release some of their ideas publicly. He says he’s optimistic the Senate will eventually take action to regulate the tech industry.
“There will be some areas that we don’t want to go into, but there are also some areas that we have a very broad consensus on,” Rounds said.
Tillis says senators may have to spend some time laying the groundwork and educating colleagues on why some regulation is needed, with an eye to passing legislation in the next Congress.
“This can’t be the wild, wild west,” Tillis said.
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Associated Press writer Stephen Groves contributed to this report.
