A user revolt has only made Congress more determined to ban TikTok. But it’s not over yet.
congressional offices on Capitol Hill were inundated with phone calls and social media posts begging them to reconsider an audacious bill currently moving through Congress: a potential ban on TikTok.
The social media app told its users to call their members of Congress in protest of the new bipartisan bill, arguing that a ban would infringe on their constitutional right to free expression and harm businesses and creators across the country.
Teens and the elderly alike reportedly pleaded with congressional staff, saying they spend all day on the app. Creators posted on TikTok urging their followers to do the same. Some offices decided to temporarily shut down their phone lines as a result, which meant that they couldn’t field calls from their constituents about other issues either.
Lawmakers in both parties didn’t take kindly to the impromptu lobbying frenzy. Some characterized it as confirmation of their fears that the Chinese-owned app — which is already banned on government devices — is brainwashing America. The overrun phone lines were merely “making the case” for the bill, US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X.
Indeed, all 50 members of the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted Thursday to advance the legislation, which would require TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the app within 165 days or else it will be removed from US app stores.
That sets up a vote on the House floor next week. The White House has backed the bill from the beginning, reportedly providing technical support to legislators when they were drafting it (even as President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has started using TikTok for voter outreach).
In other words, this bill isn’t just grandstanding. It has a real chance of becoming law.
That said, there’s the crucial question of whether it would survive legal scrutiny. A federal court recently overturned a Montana law that sought to ban TikTok. Though legislators sponsoring the US House bill argue that it is narrow in scope and would not amount to a total ban on TikTok that would violate the First Amendment, some legal experts believe otherwise.
“In my view, this loaded gun is a ban in all but name, and banning TikTok is obviously unconstitutional,” said Ramya Krishnan, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “This ban on TikTok is materially the same [as the Montana ban] in all the ways that matter.”Can Congress ban TikTok?
The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said.
Lawmakers argue that the bill under consideration isn’t actually a total ban. Rather, it would enact a new authority to ban apps in “narrowly defined situations” when they are controlled by a foreign adversary, New Jersey Rep.
