Shou Zi Chew, chief executive officer of TikTok Inc., testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January.
That action would be an unprecedented move by Congress to use legislation to threaten the ban of a large consumer technology platform. If it’s signed into law, ByteDance intends to fight the effort in court and exhaust all legal challenges before it considers any kind of divestiture, people familiar with the matter have said.
Instead of hitting the airwaves on traditional news media channels popular with the DC set in the days leading up to the House vote, the company gave a TikTokker an interview with Beckerman, a key part of its lobbying efforts.
TikTok has argued that the legislation now close to becoming law would violate the First Amendment and pointed to its spending of $2 billion on data privacy efforts to try to allay national security concerns. The company has brought creators and small business owners to the US Capitol to argue they would suffer economic losses without TikTok.
Opponents of the bill, such as Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, could still try to strip out the TikTok measure from the larger bill in the Senate, but such efforts aren’t likely to be successful.TikTok rose to prominence during the pandemic as a place to share entertaining, short videos without the expectation of perfection that hangs over apps like Instagram.