A bipartisan coalition in Congress introduced a bill this week that would ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t divest itself from the app. The bill’s sponsors framed the legislation as critical to ensuring that America’s biggest adversary can’t control one of its most dominant tech platforms.
Now, TikTok is using that dominance to fight back, sending push notifications to its users asking them to call Congress and oppose the bill. “This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to Fast Company.
In many ways, TikTok’s ability to mobilize as many as 170 million of its users around a political cause is only evidence of the kind of influence the app has amassed—the very power that concerns lawmakers in the first place, given the Chinese government’s broad control over private enterprise. But while the stakes for TikTok may be existential, it’s certainly not the first tech platform to leverage its army of users against proposed legislation.
Back in 2015, when New York City was considering a cap on new for-hire vehicle licenses, Uber retaliated by offering free rides to users who agreed to join a pro-rideshare protest at City Hall and even built a mockup in the app showing long wait times that could result from the new municipal law. Around the same time, following the successful defeat of a ballot measure that would have curbed Airbnb’s growth in San Francisco, the home-sharing company began organizing its hosts into “clubs” that could act as mini-unions to push back against other similar proposals.
Academics have referred to this sort of corporate maneuvering as “regulatory entrepreneurship,” where well-funded startups forge ahead into tightly regulated industries then marshall their significant user bases to fight back against government interference later on. “Not all companies are well-loved enough by the public for this to be viable, but for those with the support of their users and stakeholders, it has proven a particularly effective tactic,” wrote legal scholars Elizabeth Pollman, now of the University of Pennsylvania, and Jordan Barry, now of USC Gould School of Law, in a 2016 paper.
But unlike Airbnb and Uber, TikTok isn’t exactly operating in a tightly regulated market. Quite the opposite, in fact. Generally speaking, social media platforms face few impediments to growth. And still, even as its user base has soared, TikTok has for years faced a perilous existence in the U.S., dating back to 2020 when former President Donald Trump used an executive order to try to force ByteDance to sell TikTok under threat of a ban. A series of lawsuits filed by TikTok and TikTok influencers halted Trump’s efforts, and when President Biden took office the next year, he revoked the ban.
But policymakers at all levels of government have continued to scrutinize the platform and its ties to China. Last year, the White House took a first step by banning the app on federal employees’ government devices. This is despite TikTok’s efforts to assure the U.S. government that it has walled off U.S. users’ data from its Chinese parent company through a partnership with Oracle. Just last month the company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, declared definitively before a Senate hearing, “We have not been asked for any data by the Chinese government, and we have never provided it.”
The bill TikTok is now opposing would prohibit U.S. app stores or web hosts from distributing or hosting TikTok, unless ByteDance divests within 165 days of the bill’s enactment. While the bill is clearly intended to force a sale or ban of TikTok, it leaves open the possibility that it could also apply to other apps that are controlled by any other company the President “views as a significant threat to the national security.”
Already, civil liberties groups have come out in fierce opposition to the bill, calling it an unconstitutional affront to free speech. “Just because the bill sponsors claim that banning TikTok isn’t about suppressing speech, there’s no denying that it would do just that,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in a statement.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of TikTok’s users have been resolutely opposed to such a ban. According to Pew Research polling last fall, some 56% of TikTok users in the U.S. oppose a ban, compared to just 16% who support it. The question now is whether TikTok can effectively rally that support to secure its own future.
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