A bill to require CCP-linked ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok or, if it does not comply, to ban TikTok in the United States has passed in the U.S. House.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, Wisconsin Republican and a co-sponsor of the legislation, said Congress must ensure TikTok has a future as a company for Americans or for the Chinese Communist Party, but not both.
“The Chinese Communist Party does not have a First Amendment right to conduct malign influence operations in the United States,” Mr. Gallagher said in a video on X. “We need to cut out the Chinese Communist Party tumor from TikTok.”
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers authored the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would stop app stores and hosting services from making foreign-adversary-controlled apps accessible online.
Reasons that lawmakers and others support the bill include the fact that Chinese businesses like ByteDance are not permitted to function in splendid isolation from the Chinese Communist Party; the CCP’s interest in stealing data, of which ByteDance has extracted plenty via TikTok; and the established use of TikTok as an avenue of CCP propaganda and censorship.
On February 5, 2024, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published the “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” In the section on Malign Influence Operations in the section on China, the report says that “Beijing’s growing efforts to actively exploit perceived U.S. societal divisions move it closer to Moscow’s playbook for influence operations. China is demonstrating a higher degree of sophistication in its influence activity, including experimenting with generative AI. TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”
The next section, on Intelligence Operations, refers to the CCP’s ambitions to expand these operations globally and mentions its “data collection” and “advanced analytic capabilities” but does not mention TikTok or ByteDance.
MARCH 21, 2024 UPDATE: It seems that the legislation that just passed the U.S. House is as sweeping an assault on freedom of speech—certainly not directed solely at TikTok—as a previous legislative attempt. I should have said more about the details of the legislation in this and a related post.
See Matt Taibbi’s Racket News article “Why the TikTok Ban is So Dangerous: Did they tell you the part about giving the president sweeping new powers?” (March 15, 2024).
Taibbi says:
As written, any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States” is covered.
Currently, the definition of “foreign adversary” includes Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China.
The definition of “controlled,” meanwhile, turns out to be a word salad, applying to “(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country; (B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or (C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B).”
A “foreign adversary controlled application,” in other words, can be any company founded or run by someone living at the wrong foreign address, or containing a small minority ownership stake. Or it can be any company run by someone “subject to the direction” of either of those entities. Or, it’s anything the president says it is. Vague enough?
Yes, more than vague enough.
Also see:
The Federalist: “Why The ‘#StopWillow’ Movement On TikTok May Be A CCP Influence Campaign”
“I made a spreadsheet of 64 TikTok accounts with viral videos opposing the Willow Project. As of last Friday [March 24, 2023], each of the accounts, with videos garnering anywhere from 65,000-7.6 million views, had posted exclusively anti-Willow Project content and began first posting on Feb. 28 at the earliest. None of the videos include people’s faces. All of them use AI-generated voices or trending sounds and feature many of the same videos.”
StopTheChinazis.org: “TikTok Is Pretty Much a Chinese Communist Party App, Study Confirms”
“The study can’t be considered in isolation, though; the ‘strong possibility’ that TikTok obeys the CCP propaganda-wise is really a virtual certainty.”
StopTheChinazis.org: “Proof TikTok Protects User Info From ChinaGov”
“So any organization based in China ‘shall’ help with intelligence gathering if the Chinese government asks. And must also ‘keep the secrets of the national intelligence work from becoming known to the public.’ Is there another provision in Article 7 that says ‘unless you are asked about these secrets in a congressional hearing’?”
