After breathlessly charging through legislation that could ultimately evict TikTok from millions of adolescent-addled smartphones across America, the House of Representatives has now, rather anticlimactically, handed the bill over to the Senate where it appears to be settling in for a long and uneventful nap.
The House’s TikTok bill, formally recognized by more serious people as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” passed with impressive bipartisan fanfare last month. The legislation would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app or risk seeing it banned from U.S. app stores, which in teenager-speak translates to a fate worse than dial-up.
However, once the bill made its way across the Capitol to the Senate, the receptivity there has been lukewarm at best, iced-coffee cold at worst. Senators, many of whom have discovered TikTok only recently and grudgingly in staff-briefings, are expressing concerns about the bill’s practical implications, possible First Amendment flutters, and general uneasiness about breaking up teenagers’ favorite time-sink.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, doing his best impression of ambiguity in motion, has not promised a vote and prefers what he calls a “thorough review” which generally means nothing will happen until further notice, at which point further notice will also be reviewed.
Meanwhile, TikTok, ever fond of mobilizing its youthful user base with the kind of urgency previously reserved for boy band reunions, has fired up its PR engines, arguing that the bill amounts to censorship wrapped in geopolitical anxiety. TikTok spokespersons have lamented that the platform is being scapegoated in the broader U.S.-China technological arm-wrestling match, a contest neither side seems particularly eager to win but remains determined not to lose.
Backers of the bill, including House lawmakers who momentarily remembered their login passwords to post about it, are now looking at the Senate with mild irritation and major concern that the momentum may be slowing faster than a TikTok trend that got old last Tuesday.
For now, the bill sits in procedural purgatory, with Senate committees reviewing, rewording and likely re-caffeinating it until such time as a bipartisan agreement can be reached or, more realistically, until attention shifts to the next tech-related panic.
The antitrust heat may be building, but for now, TikTok remains safe and scrolling — at least until Congress next remembers that it exists.
Just when TikTok thought it was cancelled, the Senate hit snooze on the alarm.