WASHINGTON — Dire warnings about TikTok dominated conversations on Capitol Hill earlier this year, with both Republicans and Democrats describing the Chinese-owned app as one of the gravest national security threats to the U.S.
But the congressional concern has quieted down in the months since a contentious March hearing with TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew. There was the U.S. debt limit to raise. House Republicans are busy investigating President Joe Biden’s administration and family. And lawmakers have turned their attention to the potentially epic impact of artificial intelligence.
“Congress has a pretty limited attention span,” said Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “AI is the topic du jour on Capitol Hill.”
Some of those who were leading the effort to curtail TikTok’s U.S. operations say they are worried Congress missed the moment to ban the popular app or force Bytedance Ltd., its Chinese parent company, to sell.
“It’s more of a victim of how everything is in this place, where it’s like our energy and attention gets sapped by a million things every single week,” said Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican. Crenshaw said he supports banning TikTok and there are still conversations behind the scenes on the best strategy.
“But how do you actually do it?” Crenshaw asked. “It seems like a simple answer. It’s really not.”
The reprieve for TikTok, which may prove temporary, is reminiscent of Congress’s earlier efforts to regulate social media such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, which foundered on indecision and partisan divisions over the nature of the perceived problem and how to solve it.
In the meantime, TikTok is becoming more entrenched in the U.S. economy and culture. It continues to grow its 150 million-strong U.S. user base — a built-in constituency of supporters — and expand its e-commerce offerings.
Critics says TikTok’s reach and the devotion of its followers make it a potent tool for gathering information about Americans — and for influencing what they see and believe. U.S. officials have been skeptical of TikTok’s promise to separate its U.S. data and operations from its Beijing-based owner.
Bills to explicitly ban TikTok would face certain constitutional challenges, both for violating free speech protections and for targeting a specific company. Broader approaches to regulating foreign-owned technology have been rejected by Republicans who oppose giving the government more power.
A TikTok-only ban is being put to the test this year in Montana, where the company is suing to stop a new law that would make it illegal to offer the app to residents of the state. The law may well be found unconstitutional before it takes effect in January.
The exercise has given TikTok an opportunity to try out its broader defense strategies.
In Montana, TikTok sent notifications in the app about the potential ban, encouraged users to contact their representatives and set up a phone bank to urge the governor to veto the bill.
The outcome in Montana could help inform the strategy in Congress.
There’s also the question of what the Biden administration is — or isn’t — doing. Officials haven’t publicly discussed the review of TikTok’s data security proposal by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which has already taken more than a year. House Republicans have accused the administration of delaying a CFIUS decision, especially as officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken seek to re-establish lines of communication with China.
A Senate bill supported by the Biden administration would empower the Commerce secretary to evaluate the national security risk of any technology connected to an adversarial nation such as China or Russia. The measure sponsored by Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota has met opposition from Republicans who say it amounts to government overreach and it doesn’t stand a chance in the GOP-led House. Thune said he’s working on amendments to respond to concerns by narrowing the bill’s scope.
In the House, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Washington state Republican who chairs the committee where Chew testified, said she’s working on her own bill to ban TikTok, which she says will be “very targeted.”
Many of the lawmakers who oppose a TikTok ban — especially Democrats whose voters skew toward the young generation of TikTok users — say a better approach would be to restrict data collection and sharing for all social media companies.
New proposals continue to trickle out. A bipartisan group of sponsors in the Senate and House is reintroducing a bill to create export rules for user data that’s more rigorous for countries deemed to be high-risk and could be waived for those considered low-risk.
Yet even Anna Eshoo, the California Democrat who is one of the original sponsors of that bill in the House, said the fervent concern over TikTok just a few months ago seems a distant memory.
“Given all that I have on my plate,” Eshoo said, “I feel like it’s deeply buried.”
