Bipartisan Push to Address TikTok Ownership Sparks Political Complexity
It might be funny if the dispute were playing out on TikTok.
But this time the dispute is about TikTok, its Chinese ownership, and the very serious politics of Washington’s anti-Chinese fever. By an overwhelming, bipartisan margin, the House posed a resolution demanding that TikTok break from its Chinese ownership within six months or face a U.S. ban. In the Senate, prospects are less certain, with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, vowing to block a vote as unconstitutional.
It is the first time Congress will have banned a social media platform under the same thinking that the nation would not allow ownership of a television network that is bound by Chinese law to open its records to the Chinese government.
The irony or dark humor is only in all the flip-flopping going on among our leaders. Here was Donald Trump, who usually leads the anti-China chorus, now suddenly suggesting that TikTok isn’t as bad as his fellow Republicans insist. He could be waking to the reality that there are an estimate 170 million American TikTok users, with the largest current following among young people.
Of course, Trump recently had dinner with Club for Growth bankroller John Yass, a major investor in TikTok, about throwing significant money toward the Trump campaign, and suddenly Trump is now a fan of weird video parodies and against any ban for TikTok. The greater irony is that until last month’s rapprochement with Yass, the real billionaire had promised his multiple millions to defeat Trump. Trump now says that supporting even a Chinese-owned TikTok is better than helping rival Facebook, whom he labels an “enemy of the people” for clamping down on election disinformation from Trump’s campaign.
The vote also saw Congressional Republicans, who ask only how high when Trump suggests that they jump, defying the former president. Somehow anti-China sentiment even trumps Trump. Despite repeated testimony from TikTok executives that they have put firewalls between the now-American run company and the owning Byte Dance, it is divestment from the Chinese ownership that is the target.
And then there is Joe Biden, who promises to sign a bill that could ban TikTok even in the face of waning support from young Americans and in defiance of his own previous positions.
So long as we’re adding up the ironies, there is TikTok itself, which has been prompting young users to lobby Congress to block the bill — showing the very heavy sense of influencing disaffected Americans that the bill intends to quash. The prospects for a sale of Byte Dance seem small.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would allow the president, via the FBI and intelligence agencies, to name certain social media apps as national security threats if they are determined to be under the control of foreign adversaries. Apps deemed a would be banned from U.S. app stores unless they sever ties with foreign-controlled entities within 180 days, though doing so just sounds like an endless and unsuccessful venture.
Absurd Public Hearings
If Congress keeps it around, TikTok parodies might be the best way to capture the absurdity of Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearings with Special Counsel Robert Hur, the Republican prosecutor who decided that there would be no criminal charges filed against Joe Biden for holding onto classified documents.
Hur repeatedly said his lack of charges were not an “exoneration,” just an acknowledgement that no crime would be charged, and seeming endless hours were spent on definitions of “willfulness” in retaining government documents.
Instead, Hur’s investigation was a year-long probe that seemed to show that Biden is old. “No joke,” as Biden would say. Indeed, it soon became quite blurry just what the point of the televised hearing was setting out to achieve other than giving each side a chance to debase the other’s candidate — and to argue that the elderly memory characterization was utterly gratuitous and intentionally partisan.
Democrats sought to make the hearing about clearing Biden, and emphasizing that Trump faces multiple criminal charges for retaining and obstructing justice in seeking to hide them from the FBI and federal officials — and that Trump is old and forgetful too. Republicans insisted that since Hillary Clinton and Biden had been touched by retention of classified documents, it was “weaponized Justice” that only Trump faces charges — without wanting to look at months of allegations of obstruction or attempts to hide evidence.
Then, the 40 or so congressmen spent four hours pretending that they had been in Hur’s shoes, and either cursing out Hur or praising him, essentially for calling out Biden’s poor, elderly memory as part of his public release.
Two developments added to the inane nature of the hearing. First was the release of the actual transcript of the five hours that Hur spent with Biden, which showed that Biden often was super engaged and other times could not recall details. The transcript was at odds with Hur’s overall expressed finding that Biden was hobbled by frailness — the only message that got hyped publicly.
And, on the same day, a previously unidentified Mar-a-Lago employee, Brian Butler, who volunteered first-hand testimony to CNN about his role in unwittingly moving classified documents onto Trump’s private plane — on the same day that Trump was supposed to be turning them over to his attorney and the FBI for return to the government. It seemed the exact antidote to the hearing to air actual testimony that should be heard in a court rather than a television interview.
It would have been a better TikTok vid than breathless breaking news, but it did underscore the seriousness of the charges and of the seeming cooperation of U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon in repeatedly delaying the trial and ordering release of the names of witnesses in the case.