Early last year, the US ban on TikTok seems inevitable. Several countries banned TikTok from government devices by the end of 2022 due to security concerns, and several legal actions were taken against the short video app last year. At the start of the new year, the US House of Representatives followed suit, and four universities blocked TikTok’s campus WiFi.
In the spring, the project turned to prevent TikTok from flooding. Shou Zi Chew was summoned to parliament in March for questioning. In April, with the support of the White House (and former Joe Biden), a federal ban on the app was impossible but imminent.
But now, the flood has quickly broken – the Commerce Committee of the US Senate has confirmed in December that the laws related to TikTok will not be discussed before the end of the year. With the Senate’s final decision, 2023 is the year Congress will forget about banning TikTok. “A lot of times it came out after the initial attention had faded,” said David Greene, a civil rights attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “It seems now that the idea of a ban is a political statement, an opinion piece, not a serious legislative act.”
The political war over TikTok centered on allegations that its China-based parent company, ByteDance, could collect sensitive user data and censor content that goes against the demands of the Chinese Communist party.
TikTok, which has more than 150 million users in the United States, denies it improperly uses US data and has emphasized its billion-dollar efforts to store that information on servers outside its home country. Reports have cast doubt on the veracity of some of TikTok’s assertions about user data. The company declined to comment on a potential federal ban.
With distress over the influence of social media giants mounting for years, and tensions with China high after the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon hovering over the US in February 2023, attacks on TikTok became more politically viable for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Legislative efforts ensued, and intensified.
The House foreign affairs committee voted in March along party lines on a bill aimed at TikTok that Democrats said would require the administration to effectively ban the app and other subsidiaries of ByteDance. The US treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in March demanded that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell off the app or face the possibility of a ban. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and more than two dozen other senators in April sponsored legislation – backed by the White House – that would give the administration new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.
But none of these laws ever made it to a vote, and many have stalled entirely as lawmakers turned their attention to the boom in artificial intelligence. Warner told Reuters in December that the bill he authored has faced intensive lobbying from TikTok and had little chance of survival. “There is going to be pushback on both ends of the political spectrum,” he said.