A Breakdown of the Bizarre Factions Fighting Over the TikTok Ban Bill

Sorting out the strange bedfellows.

(Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

THE HOUSE RECENTLY PASSED, in a lopsided vote of 352 to 65, H.R. 7521, a bill that aims to sever TikTok, the popular social media platform, from its Chinese owner, ByteDance. The bill would give ByteDance six months to sell TikTok to a purchaser blessed by the federal government. Should a sale fail to occur—and the Chinese government has said it will not allow one—the bill would require app stores and internet hosting services to stop offering TikTok to users. H.R. 7521 is now in the Senate, which is expected to hold a hearing in the next few weeks (a sign that key senators may want to slow the process down).

Even the most basic elements of the TikTok question remain contested. Is TikTok a foreign “spy app”? Are its algorithms manipulated by a hostile state? Does H.R. 7521 even qualify as a TikTok “ban”? These uncertainties go some way to explaining why the feud over TikTok defies the familiar partisan categories. Dan Crenshaw and Nancy Pelosi support H.R. 7521; Mike Lee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez oppose it. Beyond Congress, the debate gets even woolier. Peter Suderman of Reason quips that the coalition of “weirdos” opposing the bill, in particular, resembles a “midnight drunk dinner at Denny’s.” A puzzling mix of overlapping camps are flinging a bewildering array of arguments at each other.

It seems confusing—and it is. But fear not. Here is a handy guide to knowing your TikTok political factions.

H.R. 7521’s Lead Sponsors (Pro-Bill, Obviously)

H.R. 7521 was introduced by Reps. Mike Gallagher (happy trails) and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the bipartisan duo at the head of the House’s Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. In a recent interview, Gallagher set forth the conventional case for the bill. The “fundamental danger,” he explained, is that “TikTok is owned by ByteDance, and ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.” This poses a danger to “the security of Americans’ data on the platform,” the thinking goes, and it creates “the potential for [TikTok] to be used for the propaganda purposes of the [CCP].”

In the same interview, Krishnamoorthi described the propaganda threat in expansive terms. The worry is not merely that TikTok might (say) remove videos on the Tiananmen Square massacre, or promote videos critical of the Biden administration’s policy toward Israel. “In China,” Krishnamoorthi claimed, Douyin (the country’s version of TikTok) “promote[s] content about healthy living, about STEM education, about calisthenics and exercise, even for young adults. Here in the United States, it’s about drug paraphernalia, oversexualization of teenagers, and it’s constant content about suicidal ideation.”

The CCP-Wary Center (Pro-Bill)

The House report for H.R. 7521 reflects Gallagher’s concerns. Apps “controlled by foreign adversary countries . . . can be used,” says the report, “to collect vast amounts of data on Americans, conduct espionage campaigns, and push misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda on the American public.”

These are the primary considerations that drove an overwhelming majority of the House to support an anti-TikTok bill. As Speaker Mike Johnson put it: “Today’s bipartisan vote demonstrates Congress’ opposition to Communist China’s attempts to spy on and manipulate Americans, and signals our resolve to deter our enemies.”

Some of the legislators took a more exalted view of themselves. During the floor debate, Rep. Nancy Pelosi declared that H.R. 7521 “is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It’s an attempt to make TikTok better.” (The less said about her follow-up remark—“Tik Tok toe. A winner.”—the better.) Gallagher has gone so far as to assert that, by forcing TikTok into the hands of a less tainted and more transparent owner, Congress is delivering value to TikTok’s investors.

Donald Trump (Once Pro-Ban; Now Anti-Bill)

As usual, Donald Trump’s North Star is his own self interest. As president, he pushed for a ban on TikTok in service of his effort to look tough on China. Now that a potential ban would not be his doing, he has reversed course.

Trump says that banning TikTok would double Facebook’s business. As a matter of antitrust law, that’s a reasonable concern. But Donald Trump does not care about antitrust law. He cares about Donald Trump. And Donald Trump insists to this day that Facebook “cheated in the last Election.” In Trump’s view, Facebook is the “true Enemy of the People.”

There is also the curious fact that, shortly before announcing his opposition to H.R. 7521, Trump met with Jeff Yass, a wealthy investor with a $21 billion stake in ByteDance. (That reminds me, did you know that Trump has been strapped for cash?)

First Amendment Ultras (Anti-Bill)

The CCP is a brutal dictatorship. It’s only sensible to worry about that regime’s efforts to disperse its propaganda on our shores. Even so, this is America. And in America, you have a right to read, watch, and believe crazy things. Controlling the flow of ideas is what the other guys—authoritarian governments, such as the CCP—do. That’s what Rep. Jim Himes thinks. “One of the key differences between us and [our] adversaries,” he argued in a statement on his vote against H.R. 7521, “is the fact that they shut down newspapers, broadcast stations, and social media platforms. We do not.”

This is more than just a vibe about what it means to be America. The point finds support in the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. “In 1962, Congress passed a law restricting the ability of Americans to subscribe to foreign communist periodicals,” write Paul Matzko and Jennifer Huddleston of the Cato Institute. “But three years later, in Lamont v. Postmaster General, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous rebuke to Congress, ruling that Americans had the right to unrestricted access to that material.” Indeed, one of the publications in question was “the Peking Review, a propaganda outlet of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Civil Society Groups (Anti-Bill)

The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, too, question whether the anti-propaganda rationale for H.R. 7521 runs afoul of the First Amendment. In addition, they point out that the anti-surveillance rationale looks like a fig leaf for legislators’ desire to control speech. “It is hard to take lawmakers at their word about their privacy concerns with TikTok,” observe Hudson Hongo and David Greene of EFF, “given that Congress has consistently failed to enact comprehensive data privacy legislation.” “This bill would do little,” they go on, “to stop the many other ways adversaries (foreign and domestic) collect, buy, and sell our data.”

Trade Warriors (Pro-Ban; Bill Second-Guessers)

In the wake of the House’s vote on H.R. 7521, the CCP’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained on X that the bill “puts the US on the wrong side of the principles of fair competition and international trade rules.” Other X users (probably gleefully) appended a community note that reads: “X, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitch, Pinterest, Wikipedia, Reddit, and various other Western services have been banned by the Chinese Government for many years.”

A sick burn, not to mention a plausible ground for banning TikTok in its own right. Mike Solana (founder of Pirate Wires) and Palmer Luckey (founder of Anduril) agree that this trade disparity should have been the primary, if not the sole, impetus for a bill like H.R. 7521.

The House went a different way. They’ve made TikTok’s fate a “culture war issue,” in Luckey’s words. If H.R. 7521 is enacted, and it runs into First Amendment problems in court, Congress will be left to wonder if the tech bros were on to something.

The Jingo Right (Pro-Bill)

For some Republicans, mouthing the mainstream’s national-security concerns isn’t enough. For them, it seems, those concerns are simply too reasonable. These politicians can’t help making it weird. In this instance, that means hyperventilating over how the Chinese hivemind is waging a 4-D chess campaign to destroy us from within.

During her outlandishly creepy response to President Biden’s State of the Union address, for instance, Sen. Katie Britt was terrified that the CCP’s indomitable strategists will mold paper-fragile American minds. “You see,” she intoned, “the CCP knows that if it . . . conquers . . . the minds of our next . . . generation. It. Conquers. America.” (Yes, that really was her cadence.)

Clearly, the time has come to separate patriots from traitors. With us or against us. Rep. Dan Crenshaw is only too happy to frame things in these terms. “Voting against this bill is a vote for the Chinese Communist Party,” he insists. When an all-powerful adversary is about conquer . . . the minds of our next . . . generation, ad hominem attacks are table stakes. “The opponents of this bill aren’t defending free speech,” Crenshaw proclaims; “they’re defending Chinese access to American data and American minds.”

The Paranoid Right (Anti-Everything)

Once you embark on the sea of paranoia, there’s no telling where you’ll wash up. Some on the right (along, strangely enough, with Rep. Krishnamoorthi) fear the CCP’s long-con plan to destroy the West by depriving our children of STEM videos. Others are so far down the rabbit hole that they can no longer distinguish between the CCP and the United States.

“Here’s what’s actually going on,” submits Sean Davis, cofounder of the far-right website the Federalist, apparently in all seriousness. “Deep State toadies are taking advantage of anti-China sentiment to transfer TikTok’s surveillance apparatus from China’s evil surveillance state to the U.S. government’s evil surveillance state.” The “CCP-owned U.S. government” wants, in this telling, “to be the ones spying on you and stealing your data and poisoning the minds of your children.” Rep. Thomas Massie reposted Davis’s rant, asking, “Is he wrong?”

This is like when flat-earthers take to ridiculing each other’s arguments. (“You deny the dome theory in favor of the disk theory? Preposterous!”) It’s madmen shouting at each other in a hall of mirrors. It’s the ouroboros eating its tail. Small wonder the GOP-controlled House can’t govern. It is a testimony to TikTok’s (political) unpopularity that most of the House GOP managed to rally around H.R. 7521.

Skeptics of the National Security State (Anti-Bill)

Stepping out of an intelligence briefing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal called TikTok “a gun aimed at Americans’ heads.” That wording—“aimed,” not “being fired”—could be significant. TikTok earned the distrust to which it is subject, not least when, as part of an internal leak investigation, it used its own data to track journalists. But has the company undertaken surveillance or propaganda operations at the behest of the CCP? We still don’t know.

The intelligence agencies’ case against TikTok appears to stand entirely on what TikTok could do. Some progressives are unimpressed. Rep. Mark Pocan objected that, at the intelligence briefing he attended, officials “did a lot of could-have, maybe,” while providing no “urgent reason” to act now. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hits a similar note when she says that “any national security concerns should be laid out to the public prior to a vote.”

Before they endorse a TikTok bill, some on the left will demand to see, and show the public, the evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

Skeptics of Executive Power (Anti-Bill)

The Democrats on guard against the Director of National Intelligence find their mirror image in Republicans on guard against the president.

Though it is plainly directed at TikTok (it even mentions TikTok by name), H.R. 7521 in fact covers all “foreign adversary controlled applications.” It empowers the president to decide which of those apps pose a “national security threat.” That power will be abused, Sen. Mike Lee protests. Similarly, Rep. Massie contends that the bill is a “Trojan horse” for banning platforms beyond TikTok.

Some on the right even believe that H.R. 7521 is geared toward the banning of X, which, of course, is owned by Elon Musk, who—the theory seems to run—will be accused of being a Russian or Chinese stooge. Musk himself has come out against the bill on roughly this ground.

Social Media Haters (Pro-Bill . . . ?)

Some politicians hate social media tout court. These are the people who compare social media to tobacco. So great is their disdain for the entire enterprise—and for all Big Tech companies—that it’s hard to tell where they come down on a bill focused narrowly on TikTok. Take Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She wants to stand up an independent government agency for regulating social media platforms, and she has suggested that she will not support a bill that does much less than that. (“We need curbs on social media,” she says. “But we need those curbs to apply across the board.”)

Sen. Josh Hawley is so mad that it’s unclear, at times, what he’s even talking about. For one thing, he seems to believe that “Big Tech” is a unified entity seeking to scupper H.R. 7521. “Just remember,” he writes, “the Senate is bought and paid for by Big Tech.” (As though Facebook is lobbying senators to keep TikTok around?) “Nothing that Big Tech doesn’t want moves across the Senate floor,” he muses ominously. (Is TikTok all of “Big Tech” in this scenario?)

TikTok Lovers (Pro-Dance Videos)

One small mystery about the House’s more than 5-to-1 vote for H.R. 7521 is why so many legislators were willing to risk banning something so popular. TikTok is used by 170 million Americans, and it’s especially popular with young people. For a few Democrats, at least, a pragmatic thought—Don’t piss off your Gen Z constituents—seems to register. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, for example, notices that a TikTok ban might “harm users who rely on TikTok for their livelihoods.”

Then there’s Rep. Jamaal Bowman. A prolific TikToker himself, Bowman recently took to the platform to propose that Congress do just about anything, with its time, other than ban TikTok. (He seemed to suggest, rather ambitiously, that Congress worry about TikTok only after it has “solved” racism, “ended” wealth inequality, and guaranteed a job for everyone.) Bowman has praised TikTok for being more “enjoyable” and “educational” than other platforms. He says it’s “just a better product, period.”

In the shouted words of one TikTok influencer: “The only thing this gaggle of 535 of the richest, most powerful welfare queens being paid on a government dime can agree on is that I can’t watch fucking Tiki Tockies!”