TikTok’s call to overwhelm Congress backfires

[UPDATED] TikTok notified users of a supposed ban on the platform and encouraged them to call their representatives. But the campaign only seemed to make things worse.

UPDATE: On Wednesday, The US House of Representatives approved the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act which requires China tech giant ByteDance to sell TikTok, or the popular app will effectively be banned in the U.S.

The bill now heads to the Senate where passage is less certain. President Biden has said he will sign the bill if it reaches his desk.

Op-ed by Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt

Flooding Congress with phone calls can work wonders to stop bad bills at times. The SOPA blackout 12 years ago was one of the most effective advocacy campaigns in history. Coincidentally, I was at the Capitol that day, and wandering the halls between meetings, hearing phones ringing non-stop was amazing.

However, that process was carefully planned out over weeks, with sites pushing a very clear message of why internet users should call Congress and complain about the terrible copyright laws that were being pushed.

It appears that TikTok may have taken the wrong lesson from all that and assumed that simply flooding Congress with calls is an effective strategy. It can be, but you have to equip callers with a basic understanding of what it is that they’re calling for and why. And maybe it doesn’t make sense to do it on a bill built off the (mostly false) belief that your app is controlling the minds of gullible American voters.

On Thursday, TikTok put up a pop-up on all US users’ screens when they went to get their daily fill of random videos:

“Stop a TikTok shutdown!” it yells, claiming that “Congress is planning a total ban of TikTok. Speak up now — before your government strips 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.”

The bill in question is stupid. It’s a fear-mongering (bipartisan) bunch of grandstanding nonsense. It doesn’t technically “ban” TikTok, but would directly require ByteDance to divest its ownership in the company. If ByteDance does not do so, then it is a ban (despite the bill’s sponsors insisting it’s not). It does seem like a pretty clear bill of attainder, targeting a single company, TikTok, out of yet another fear-mongering moral panic that a successful internet company coming out of China must be evil.

As we’ve been saying for years now, if the fear is about the privacy of American users of the platform, Congress could pass a comprehensive privacy bill. They just choose not to do so. Instead, they play up a silly culture war, which will only lead to even more retribution for American apps outside the US. Indeed, expect to see other countries passing similar bills demanding that US companies divest from successful apps in their countries, as a result of this stupid bill.

And, on top of that, the bill is almost certainly a First Amendment violation, as has been found during previous attempts to effectively ban TikTok, none of which have gone well in court.

TikTok’s gambit apparently worked in terms of getting people to call. But it didn’t always effectively get the message out:

TikTok users flooded some congressional offices with dozens of calls. Results were mixed: Some staffers dismissed the callers as uninformed, or as pranksters, or as “teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app.”

And, look, when you have a bunch of overly anxious politicians who think that TikTok is like Chinese mind control over American brains (it’s not, but that’s what they seem to think), it’s not difficult to see how telling TikTok users to call Congress could drive those politicians to think this is even more evidence of why the bill is needed, especially when there is a flood of calls from unsophisticated constituents talking about how they “spend their whole day on the app.”

And that seems to have been the case.

House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said if anything, TikTok’s orchestrated calling campaign “only exposed the degree in which TikTok can manipulate and target a message.”

And thus it’s no surprise that the committee voted 50 to 0 to advance the bill:

Lawmakers on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which greenlit the bill Thursday afternoon after months of negotiations, said the intent was not to get rid of TikTok, but to prevent a Chinese company from having access to large troves of American data.  The committee voted 50-0 to advance the bill to the full House or Representatives.

Again, it’s a painfully stupid and reactionary bill, but this campaign seemed pretty mistargeted. There was a way in which TikTok could have more effectively leveraged its large user base to talk about the problems and risks of such a bill. But just sending them in to scream at Congress was perhaps not the best approach given the specific animus behind this bill.