Bill faces uncertain fate in the Senate
WASHINGTON >> The young voices in the messages left for North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis were laughing, but the words were ominous.
“OK, listen, if you ban Tiktok I will find you and shoot you,” one said, giggling and talking over other young voices in the background. “I’ll shoot you and find you and cut you into pieces.” Another threatened to kill Tillis, and then take their own life.
Tillis’s office says it has received around 1,000 calls about Tiktok since the House passed legislation this month that would ban the popular app if its Chinabased owner doesn’t sell its stake. Tiktok has been urging its users — many of whom are young — to call their representatives, even providing an easy link to the phone numbers. “The government will take away the community that you and millions of other Americans love,” read one pop-up message from the company when users opened the app.
Tillis, who supports the House bill, reported the call to the police. “What I hated about that was it demonstrates the enormous influence social media platforms have on young people,” he said in an interview.
While more aggressive than most, Tiktok’s extensive lobbying campaign is the latest attempt by the tech industry to head off any new legislation — and it’s a fight the industry usually wins. For years Congress has failed to act on bills that would protect users’ privacy, protect children from online threats, make companies more liable for their content and put loose guardrails around artificial intelligence, among other things.
“I mean, it’s almost embarrassing,” says Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-VA., a former tech executive who is also supporting the Tiktok bill and has long tried to push his colleagues to regulate the industry. “I would hate for us to maintain our perfect zero batting average on tech legislation.”
Some lawmakers are worried that blocking Tiktok could anger millions of young people who use the app, a crucial segment of voters in November’s election. But Warner says “the debate has shifted” from talk of an outright ban a year ago to the House bill which would force Tiktok, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese technology firm Bytedance Ltd., to sell its stake for the app to continue operating.
Republicans are divided. While most of them support the Tiktok legislation, others are wary of overregulation and the government targeting one specific entity.
Hoping to persuade their colleagues to support the bill, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee have called for intelligence agencies to declassify information about Tiktok and China’s ownership that has been provided to senators in classified briefings.
“It is critically important that the American people, 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 technology companies more liable for the content they publish.
And an effort by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to quickly move legislation that would regulate the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry has yet to show any results.