The Strange Alliance Forming to Protect TikTok

The two parties that control Congress rarely agree on much, whether it's guns, the border, or how to structure the federal budget.

When it comes to pending legislation to ban the social media app TikTok, however, the battle lines between Republicans and Democrats are considerably less clear.

For months, conservatives around the United States have spearheaded efforts to ban the video-based app over TikTok's ties to Chinese company ByteDance, and its likely compliance with an opaque law in the country requiring all companies within its border to share all user data that could be deemed relevant to national security.

State governments in primarily red states like Texas and South Carolina quickly moved to ban the app from state-owned devices—citing security concerns—while in Congress, many Republican members began pushing to ban the app from the country entirely.

In December, however, outlets like Al Jazeera reported the liberal stronghold of Washington State was planning to impose its own ban on the application on government-owned devices while, later that month, Kansas' governor became the first Democrat in the U.S. to issue their own ban.

By February, Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennet was already calling for a national ban and, the following month, a bipartisan group in Congress introduced legislation seeking to ban the app entirely. TikTok later claimed President Joe Biden—who signed legislation banning the app from government-owned devices late last year—had actively warned the company he would support an effort to ban the app unless its parent company divested from TikTok entirely, drawing pushback from the company.

"If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn't solve the problem," TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan told CNN in a statement. "A change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access. The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent, US-based protection of US user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification, which we are already implementing."

Newsweek reached out to TikTok's press office via email for comment.

As Congress potentially rushes headlong into an effort to ban the app entirely, however, a bipartisan group has emerged that opposes the ban, citing concerns over restricting free speech and alienating young voters.

In a floor speech Wednesday night, Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul emerged as one of the first Republican opponents of the bill, claiming it would set a dangerous precedent of censorship at a time conservatives were already up in arms over content moderation practices at social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

"The Republican strategy to ban TikTok comes simultaneously with GOP complaints of domestic social media companies canceling and censoring conservatives," Paul wrote in a statement after his speech. "Without a hint of irony, many of these same 'conservatives' rail against censorship, while advocating for government censorship against social media apps they worry are influenced by the Chinese."

But it's not just free speech-supporting conservatives who oppose the bill.

After a five-hour grilling of TikTok CEO Shou Chew by a bipartisan cross-section of Congress in Washington, D.C. last week, progressive New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined protests on Capitol Hill objecting to efforts to ban the app after publishing her own TikTok—her first—highlighting the unprecedented nature of such an action.

"The free speech implications of a ban need to be a larger part of the conversation," Aaron Terr, director of public policy for the free speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told Newsweek. "TikTok is a wildly popular vehicle for expression for hundreds of millions of Americans. When TikTok users post and consume content on the platform, the First Amendment protects them. We should always be highly skeptical of laws that restrict our ability to communicate with each other online."

While former President Donald Trump was quick to use his executive power to ban several Chinese-owned applications like AliPay from the U.S. at the end of his term, Congress itself had never taken steps to bar any social media platform from operation in the U.S. Crackdowns on platforms like 8Chan or even the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer came instead from the company's respective hosting platforms.

While members of Congress fear data could potentially be leaked to the Chinese government, Terr said lawmakers have so far failed to demonstrate clear and present national security concerns that would warrant such a ban.

"We recognize that lawmakers have expressed concerns about the threat to national security posed by TikTok sharing private user data with the Chinese government," he added. "National security threats can't be waved away, but we also can't take any government official's claims at face value. The government would need to show concrete evidence of serious threats to national security and why a ban is necessary to mitigate them."

Other platforms, like Facebook, faced relatively paltry penalties for committing similar transgressions to those TikTok is accused of, including harvesting and selling data to private firms like Cambridge Analytica with the express intent of influencing the outcome of U.S. elections.

"In terms of TikTok's behavior and its risk to national security, it poses above the same threat that companies like Facebook and Instagram, YouTube and Twitter pose," New York Democratic Congressman Jamaal Bowman—one of the platform's most vocal supporters in Congress—said in a press conference last week defending the app.

"So let's not marginalize and target TikTok. Let's have a comprehensive conversation about legislation that we need: federal legislation to make sure people who use social media platforms are safe and their information is secure," he said.

Further concerning to conservatives and liberals alike, however, were fears that the legislation would become a sort of "Trojan Horse" allowing the federal government significant sway over what Americans were allowed to say and hear online.

By moving to ban applications deemed to aid "foreign adversaries"—like the so-called "RESTRICT Act" being weighed by Congress specifically calls to do—some conservatives feared the bill could set the groundwork to allow wanton censorship of any opinion the government didn't agree with.

In the instance of the RESTRICT Act, fears include language allowing the federal government broad leeway to survey and monitor content it deems as harmful to U.S. national security or the integrity of U.S. elections with relatively little oversight, drawing some comparisons by conservatives to the controversial U.S. Patriot Act passed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"This bill isn't really about banning TikTok," Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show Wednesday night. "It's never about what they say it is. Instead, this bill would give enormous, terrifying new powers to the federal government to punish American citizens and regulate how they communicate with one another."

Groups like FIRE agree.

"Proposals to ban TikTok because it allegedly spreads propaganda or harmful content raise the most serious First Amendment issues," said Terr. "The government could easily extend this rationale to any number of digital platforms Americans use to speak their minds. In fact, calls to regulate social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to stop the spread of "hate speech" or "misinformation" have become commonplace. But such content- and viewpoint-based restrictions on speech can't be squared with the First Amendment."

Update 03/30/23 6:00 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Aaron Terr.