House passes McMorris Rodgers’ bill that could ban TikTok if Chinese parent company doesn’t sell the app

WASHINGTON – The House passed bipartisan legislation in an overwhelming vote Wednesday that would force the Chinese parent company of TikTok to sell the wildly popular social media platform or face a ban in the United States.

The bill was shepherded through the Energy and Commerce Committee and to the House floor by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Spokane Republican who chairs the panel, just a week after it was introduced. Despite opposition from progressive Democrats and some Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, the House voted 352-65 to send the legislation to the Senate, where its fate is unclear.

After the bill was introduced on March 5, TikTok used location data to prompt its users to call their representatives in Congress, whose offices were inundated with appeals over the past week to oppose the legislation. In remarks on the House floor on Wednesday, McMorris Rodgers said that lobbying blitz was an example of how ByteDance – which owns TikTok and is required by Chinese law to cooperate with that nation’s intelligence operations – can influence the app’s 170 million American users.

“This is just a small taste of how the CCP weaponizes applications it controls to manipulate tens of millions of people to further its agenda,” she said, referring to the governing Chinese Communist Party by its initials. “Today’s legislation will end this abuse by preventing apps controlled by foreign adversaries from targeting, surveilling and manipulating the American people.”

The Energy and Commerce Committee approved the bill in a 50-0 vote on March 7. But in an interview after Wednesday’s vote, McMorris Rodgers said the swift passage was the result of months of behind-the-scenes work by her staff and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which doesn’t have the authority to advance legislation.

Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., lead the select committee and spearheaded the bill, dubbed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. It would require ByteDance to divest from TikTok within six months or have it removed from U.S. app stores. The bill wouldn’t force Americans who already have the app to delete it from their phones.

While the legislation could apply to other social media platforms owned by companies based in countries identified as “adversaries” of the United States – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – it effectively targets a single company. McMorris Rodgers said passing the TikTok bill wouldn’t change the need for Congress to pass broader legislation to govern how tech companies collect and use Americans’ personal data, which she said is her single biggest priority before she retires at the end of the year.

Opponents of the bill in both parties have argued that it would violate freedom of speech and hurt the millions of mostly young Americans who use TikTok to make money, get information and connect with others. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Seattle Democrat who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement that the bill lays out “an unworkable path to remove TikTok from ownership by a Chinese company, making it a de facto ban.”

“While I do have serious concerns about the national security implications of the Xi government’s ability to access Americans’ data through ByteDance, at the end of the day, the process of crafting this legislation was overly rushed and lacks important protections for consumers’ data,” said Jayapal, one of 50 Democrats who opposed the bill along with 15 Republicans.

Critics of TikTok say the real free speech issue is censorship not by the U.S. government but by the platform itself. A former ByteDance executive claimed in a 2023 lawsuit that the Chinese Communist Party has significant influence over the company, and a December 2023 report by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University found that TikTok seems to demote content that is critical of the Chinese government.

Rep. Kim Schrier, a Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee whose district stretches from Wenatchee to the Seattle suburbs, said in an interview Wednesday that the platform’s vast reach and potential to spread misinformation is especially relevant in an election year.

“Fundamentally, this comes down to a matter of national security,” Schrier said. “We have half of our population using TikTok every day, young people getting most of their news from TikTok … and it is a national security issue to not have China controlling the flow of information in our country.”

Schrier, a pediatrician, said she is concerned about the impact all social media platforms have on children’s mental health and she supports broader legislation to address it, but she said TikTok presents a unique challenge that warrants its own legislative response.

In the Senate, the bill would need to get through the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, led by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. In a statement, Cantwell said she shares the concerns behind the House legislation but signaled that she wants changes to the bill before she would let it advance to the Senate floor for a vote.

“I’m very concerned about foreign adversaries’ exploitation of Americans’ sensitive data and their attempts to build backdoors in our information communication technology and services supply chains,” Cantwell said. “These are national security threats and it is good members in both chambers are taking them seriously. I will be talking to my Senate and House colleagues to try to find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties.”

McMorris Rodgers said Wednesday that she had not yet spoken with Cantwell about the bill. The Spokane Republican said she was open to making some changes to address concerns with the House legislation, including potentially adding a “sunset” clause that would require Congress to revisit the program in the future.

On Wednesday, Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Marco Rubio of Florida, respectively the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, endorsed the House bill and said in a joint statement, “We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok.”

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Cantwell’s Republican counterpart on the Senate Commerce Committee, also expressed support for the House bill in an interview on CNBC on Wednesday.

President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill if it passes the House and the Senate. Trump, who sought to force a sale of TikTok when he was president, made a dramatic reversal and defended the app, posting on his Truth Social platform on March 7 that getting rid of TikTok would help Facebook, a competitor that Trump called “a true Enemy of the People!”

Trump’s reversal may be linked to donations from the billionaire financier Jeffrey Yass, an early investor in TikTok whose wealth is largely tied up in the company, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Yass is a major donor to Club for Growth, a conservative group that has financed Trump and other Republican candidates.