On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill that would give TikTok owner ByteDance a deadline to divest itself of the social-media platform. If the law passes and the deadline is not met, the app could face a ban. On Thursday, some TikTok users opened their apps and encountered this message:
Speak up now — before your government strips 170 million
Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.
This will damage millions of businesses, destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country, and deny artists an audience.
Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote
NO.
This is surprising but not unprecedented. When facing potential regulation, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and many other apps have asked users to lobby on their behalf; TikTok itself has previously made its case directly to the public too. Most of the time, these sorts of things are easy to ignore, and most people do — you tap a little x, or hit the back button, and scroll on. Except when you can’t:
This was my experience as well, and that of numerous others online: I opened TikTok and found an undismissable screen demanding that I call my representative. The only options were to go through with the call or to hard-reset the app. Pretty bold! A lot of young people might be learning the names of their representatives today. And some of them are getting through. Asked if they’d been receiving a lot of calls about TikTok, a friendly operator at the Capitol switchboard said, “Yes we have,” before forwarding me to the office of a New York representative, where a somewhat less cheery staffer confirmed that the office had been “flooded with calls” about TikTok.
It’s entirely possible that the app issue was an implementation error — while some users report being stuck at the screen, others had an option to dismiss it. In any case, TikTok’s message here is unusually direct. The company is genuinely worried about a ban:
It’s a reasonable concern! While public sentiment among voting-age Americans is somewhat skewed against TikTok, Republican and Democratic lawmakers really don’t seem to like it. To conservatives, it’s a Chinese-influence operation wearing a bad disguise. Some liberals are sympathetic to this view, but they also have a different problem with the platform, namely that it’s an unruly space in which young progressives are extremely critical of the Biden administration in front of large audiences. (Senator John Fetterman, for example, has accused the app of giving users a “warped” view of the war in Gaza.)
There’s a legislative appetite for this in other words, although it’s unclear what might happen if such a ban were to pass. Montana’s statewide TikTok ban was ultimately blocked in federal court, but legal experts have suggested that a national ban might be easier to defend on national-security grounds. In the meantime, TikTok would very much appreciate its users’ help.
This post has been updated.
