Senate Advances Proposal for Forcing TikTok Sale

Forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok is the right move and will withstand legal challenges, Senate Democrats and Republicans told us Tuesday as the chamber cleared the first procedural hurdle in approving the provision in the FY 2024 national security appropriations supplemental package (see 2404220049 and 2404190042).

The Senate voted 80-19 to invoke cloture on the House-passed foreign aid package (HR-815), which includes language forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok to continue operating the platform in the U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and several other Republicans expressed confidence in the approach, despite continued opposition from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

“My impression is most of the senators are in favor of it,” said McConnell. “I don’t think it did the [package] any harm” to include the TikTok provision. He declined to comment on a social media post from Trump, who said “Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok.” Trump urged “young people” to remember this on election day in November.

“We don’t allow foreign ownership of newspapers and media in the U.S., and [TikTok] is an avenue for our adversaries to use for propaganda purposes,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters Tuesday. Foreign ownership of periodicals is legal in the U.S. He said the House “did a good job” assembling the package, and it is the “best chance for putting this to bed.” TikTok didn’t comment Tuesday.

TikTok will likely “spend a lot of money” to get courts to strike down the language just as it did against the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act (S-686) last year, Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., said Tuesday. “They retained a ton of lobbyists and spent a lot of money working at trying to take it down, and or keep it from getting anywhere.” The “national security stakes have gotten higher since the last time we had this conversation,” including “more information out there now about how the [Chinese Communist Party] uses some of this data and information they have on Americans,” he told reporters.

“I’m very glad the House passed” the package with the TikTok legislation, Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told us. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“Any vehicle is the right vehicle” for getting TikTok to divest, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “The requirement for sale is absolutely necessary, and this vehicle is as good as any.”

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said the only concern he heard about the TikTok provision was the original six-month divestment period. The House extended the timeline to a year, which drew the support of Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

Cantwell said on the floor Tuesday that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has been “steadfast” in supporting the entire package. She noted how India identified TikTok as a national security threat and banned it. The company has since found a way to feed content in India through other apps like YouTube, she said. The divestment provision is a “non-punitive” solution to the TikTok threat in the U.S., she said. The focus of the provision is Chinese spying and surveillance, not a particular company.

TikTok is the fastest growing platform in the U.S., and it’s “operating at the direction of a foreign adversary,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said on the floor Tuesday, joining Cantwell.

“The way that [the TikTok language is] drafted” to give ByteDance “a year in which to sell it to an American company … hopefully will withstand a challenge in court," Thune told reporters. It’s not as “abrupt” a deadline as previous ban attempts, including former President Donald Trump’s 2020 executive order (see 2008070061) seeking a ban on TikTok transactions in the U.S. Two federal judges blocked the Trump EO “because it was a constitutional issue of a bill of attainder by singling out a specific company and there was no real kind of soft landing there,” Thune told reporters.

The most popular social media apps, including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and X, “spy” on Americans for profit, and banning TikTok “won’t change that,” said Fight for the Future Director Evan Greer in a statement Tuesday. “Not only is this bill laughably unconstitutional and a blatant assault on free expression and human rights, it’s also a perfect way to derail momentum toward more meaningful policies like privacy and antitrust legislation that would actually address the harms of Big Tech and surveillance capitalism.”