Should the U.S. ban TikTok?

The House passed a bill that could force the sale of TikTok, or ban the app altogether.

But is targeting a single social media platform the best way to protect Americans from espionage and covert influence campaigns?

Today, On Point: Should the U.S. ban TikTok?

Jake Auchincloss, Democratic U.S. Representative from Massachusetts. Co-sponsor of bill that would force a sale or possibly ban TikTok in the U.S.

Emily Baker-White, senior reporter covering TikTok for Forbes.

Jim Lewis, researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Chloe Sexton, owner of BluffCakes Bakery in Memphis, TN.

Part I

Astro_alexandra: Not enough people are talking about this. They’re trying to ban TikTok tomorrow. And this time, it’s different.

mrgriffis: Do you mean to tell me we have 535 Congress members and they cannot agree on nothing, besides banning TikTok? Ahh!

The_indomitable_blackman: We are actually out here living one of the novels that we read about of a dystopia, we’re living it. Do y’all see? We’re living it. Like, it’s Fahrenheit 451. Literally.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: TikTokers having their say about Congress contemplating a possible U.S. ban on TikTok.

Last week in the House, an overwhelming bipartisan majority — 352 to 65 — passed a bill targeting TikTok. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act proposes to force ownership of TikTok away from its Chinese parent company ByteDance. Or “prohibit” it from being used in the United States, and TikTok’s more than 170 million American users. The bill is now on its way to the Senate.

Now, this could be landmark legislation, not only because of how popular TikTok is in the United States. But perhaps more importantly, and more broadly, it could be one of the most significant indications yet of how the United States intends to compete, protect itself, and maintain the nation’s cherished civil rights in the digital age.

So let's start today with Massachusetts Representative Jake Auchincloss, he co-sponsored that bill, and he joins us now. Congressman, welcome to On Point.

JAKE AUCHINCLOSS: Good to be on. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So first of all, tell me, what do you think the most important reason is for the Senate to take up the bill? At this point in time, I don't see the Senate expressing any urgency to take up the bill.

AUCHINCLOSS: The Senate is rarely in a hurry. The most important reason for them to act with a sense of urgency is to protect youth mental health. The most important reason to force TikTok to answer to Congress, as opposed to the Chinese Communist Party, is that it is the first step in comprehensive social media regulation.

Families are suffering under the greed of the social media corporations, whether they're Meta, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Discord, Twitch, Snap, they all for the last decade have had the same business model. And that business model is to monetize the attention spans of our youth, and they sell those attention spans off to the highest advertising bidder.

And to make that business model work, they have to keep kids hooked on their screens. And that screen time is eating into family time. And it's making Gen Z miserable. And no, that's not, one generation complaining about the other generation, which is an age-old trope. There is strong data that indicates that since about 2012, when our era of ubiquitous iPhones plus social media apps really began, youth mental health has plummeted.

A majority now, Meghna, of teen girls say they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness. That's up radically since 2011.

CHAKRABARTI: Congressman, I just want to jump in here because you will get no argument from me on that. It's clear that since 2010, especially, there has been a dramatic and downward change in the mental health of America's young people, which is actually, we've done shows on this before. And actually, on Monday, we're going to be doing a show about the increasing number of parents who are saying no to social media for their children.

But I wonder though, if that's the primary reason, why do the words mental health never appear a single time in the bill? The first words in the bill are to protect the national security of the United States. Why is there no mention of mental health in the proposed legislation?

AUCHINCLOSS: This bill is the first of what I think are at least three steps to doing comprehensive social media regulation to support youth mental health.

The first is making sure all these platforms follow U.S. law. We obviously can't do comprehensive regulation if it doesn't apply to the most popular social media platform. That doesn't make any sense. If anything, that just gives an advantage to TikTok. So first is everyone plays by the same rules. Second is Congress should actually pass some good rules, which big tech has smothered over the last 10 years. And the first one I would say is we have to raise the age of internet adulthood from 13 to 16. Back in the 1990s, Congress decided that at the age of 13, an individual was able to transact as though they were an adult online.

Maybe that was okay in the 1990s, when you had recipe blogs out there as the most popular sites. That's no longer the case. And when I tell parents in my district that at the age of 13, their child is an adult online, they can't even believe that's true.

CHAKRABARTI: Congressman, with all due respect, there's no age mention in the bill either.

All the things you're mentioning so far, while absolutely essential to creating a safe, healthy and also free space for young people online, they're not in this bill. So I'm trying to understand why the bill aims first. In section one, subsection two, the first words are prohibition of foreign adversary-controlled applications.

Prohibition is the first line in this legislation on TikTok.

AUCHINCLOSS: But again, we cannot do comprehensive social media regulation if the most popular social media platform doesn't answer to U.S. law. So step one is this bill. Make sure the most popular social media platform answers to the U.S. law. Step two is raise the age of internet adulthood. Step three is amend Section 230 and put in place comprehensive social media guardrails the same way we did with TV, print, radio, et cetera to demand that these platforms have accountability for the toxicity that they platform and to give them a duty of care.

But steps two and three don't work if TikTok answers to Xi Jinping as opposed to Congress.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay.

AUCHINCLOSS: Now, we can go into the reasons why having the CCP control TikTok is pernicious all on its own. And I certainly believe that as well, but it's actually secondary to me. To the primary driver of this bill, which is we have got to get serious about the social media corporations productizing and attention fracking our youth.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. So now this makes more sense. But then that leads me to the question, of as you heard the little snippet of the probably zillions of TikToks now that are out there. And also, even beyond TikTok, just young people in general who are users of the platform, not only young people, actually, we'll be hearing later from a businesswoman who says she can't survive without it.

But so your point is well taken about bringing TikTok under the rule of U.S. law. And that's actually what the second section of the bill is about, to force a sale of TikTok to another entity that's not considered a foreign adversary of the United States. That's not an unusual request.

Governments do that all the time. But I wonder then, why is the prohibition section in there at all? This is what's gotten so many people upset, a hundred and plus million Americans, that there's even the possibility that a ban could take place if this bill passes.

AUCHINCLOSS: Need to have leverage to force the sale.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more.

AUCHINCLOSS: If we're going to compel a sale to a to a U.S. domiciled company or to a organization that obeys U.S. law, there needs to be leverage to force it. And so saying either sell or it's banned is the leverage necessary. And I think it says something about the Chinese Communist Party's intentions and their control and manipulation of this algorithm.

That they are so reluctant to even consider that possibility. The control that the Chinese Communist Party has over TikTok is unambiguous. Under Chinese law, any Chinese company has to grant supreme access to all data and to any algorithms that control that data upon request of the politburo.

I don't know why the United States would ever cede that kind of control to our chief adversary over the most influential media company in the world. That would, that is negligence. We would never have allowed CBS, ABC, NBC to be owned by the Soviet Union during the 1960s.

CHAKRABARTI: Let's hypothesize for a second Congressman, if you will, because let's say, given the popularity of this bill amongst members of the House, if the Senate ever does take it up.

It'll be interesting to see what happens. We also, let's say it passes Senate. We know that President Biden is quite critical of China. Who knows if he would sign it or not, but let's just theorize for a second that it goes all the way.

AUCHINCLOSS: He would sign it. He said he would sign it.

CHAKRABARTI: He said he would sign it.

Okay. So in that case, then what would you tell a hundred plus million Americans that they are living through what is essentially one of the largest bands of a product or service in U.S. history?

AUCHINCLOSS: It's not a ban. TikTok can continue to operate, but it has to answer to U.S. law.

CHAKRABARTI: And if it does not, it has 180 days before it's prohibited.

AUCHINCLOSS: And what would that tell the American public? That rather than answer to United States law, the Chinese Communist Party would rather one of the most profitable businesses they have go under. I think that says a lot about the intentions of the CCP. And I know that there are arguments about freedom of speech, and I know that there is a very healthy skepticism of anything that has the word ban in it.

And I agree, ban should be the last resort. But let's be very clear about freedom of expression. I have defended the First Amendment in my 10 years of public life, including unpopular speech. Freedom of speech is sacrosanct. Americans can continue to post whatever they want in the political domain.

They can make fun of the president. They can make fun of Trump. They can make fun of me. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. You do not have a constitutional right to have your post amplified by an algorithm controlled by a foreign adversary that has no transparency to U.S. law. That is not a civil liberty that exists anywhere.

CHAKRABARTI: Congressman, I understand readily that TikTok, because of its Chinese ownership, is both a clear and well defined first target for congressional legislation. I can appreciate that. But as you said a little earlier, really, what we have overall is a digital media, social media problem in general.

In fact, your fellow member from the Massachusetts delegation, Senator Ed Markey, has said the same thing. He says there's no TikTok problem. There's a social media digital privacy problem. So does that mean, Congressman, that if this TikTok legislation goes through, that you would also readily support future legislation that would say, provide or give the government much greater influence, power, regulatory control over Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the other social media platforms.

AUCHINCLOSS: Not only would I support it, I'm drafting it. We got to get TikTok to answer to U.S. law. And then, as we were saying at the earlier part of this conversation, step two, raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16, not 13. And step three is we have to amend Section 230, which is this blanket immunity for all these social media platforms from any kind of accountability, to say, actually, if you are platforming revenge porn, or defamation or harassment or intimate privacy violations, you do actually have liability for that behavior.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Today we're talking about the House Bill that recently passed overwhelmingly in a bipartisan vote to either force the sale of Chinese owned TikTok or to ban it entirely from the United States. Now, according to TikTok itself, more than 7 million businesses across America rely on the app to market or sell their products.

CHLOE SEXTON: Today I’m working on bringing back one of our most popular cookies that we only keep around seasonally in the spring. It’s called the death by strawberry.

CHAKRABARTI: Chloe Sexton owns BluffCakes Bakery in Memphis, Tennessee. She has always loved baking as a hobby. But, she told us --

SEXTON: Deciding to make baking a full-time career and an endeavor as a business really was a moment of desperation for me. I’d been in marketing forever and when the pandemic changed economic tides, I had told my employer I was pregnant and they fired me two days later with no cause.

CHAKRABARTI: Chloe had no choice but to start selling her giant, colorful cookies. And without a marketing budget, she found the best way to reach customers—and give them an authentic view of her business—was through TikTok.

SEXTON: When people make purchasing decisions these days, we have never been more educated and they're not feeling a personal connection with a brand. In fact, they're more alienated by brands than ever, because they're keeping a more careful eye on what are the political decisions? Who are they backing up?

Now with an app that has the visibility that TikTok has, they're able to see a real person. And every bit of how much they care and how much of their life is poured into that product. It wasn't just about me. It was about all the small businesses and things that they don't know are going on behind closed doors, unless you have an app that gives you the visibility that TikTok does.

CHAKRABARTI: Chloe attributes 85% of her revenue to TikTok. And yes, there are other apps. But Chloe says TikTok’s massive reach, plus the algorithm that’s proven so good at connecting people with content they want to see, means TikTok is not so easily replaced.

SEXTON: My business at the scale I was able to grow it, at the speed I was able to grow it, is directly in the hands of TikTok, and to take away a tool like that from small businesses would not only have such a devastating personal effect on my family, it would have a devastating effect on an economic level for the nation.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Chloe Sexton of Memphis, Tennessee. Let's bring Emily Baker-White into the conversation.

She's senior reporter covering TikTok for Forbes. Emily, welcome back to the show.

EMILY BAKER-WHITE: Thanks so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: And also let's bring Jim Lewis into the conversation. He's a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Jim, welcome back to you as well.

JIM LEWIS: Thank you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Emily, first of all, I'd love to hear your response to what Congressman Auchincloss was saying in the previous segment.

He insists that this isn't just a one-off bill targeting TikTok, that it's the first in a series of legislation that he himself is proposing to more intensely regulate social media as a whole. Do you see indications of that being true?

BAKER-WHITE: I think there are people like Representative Auchincloss who want to do that, but I'm not sure that everybody who's on board with this bill would also be on board with those other regulations. And so I think some people might see this as the first step in a number of regulations, other people might see it as a thing that they think we should do and then stop, right?

It depends on the lawmakers and whether Representative Auchincloss and others can get together the coalition they need to pass that other legislation and move it forward.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's understand a little bit more then about exactly what goes on with TikTok. We, in fact, the three of us have had this identical conversation about a year ago, but the passage of this bill in the House makes it a live issue once again.

And you heard the congressman say, look, that he has a problem. And so do many people, with the Chinese Communist Party having access to so much data coming from Americans. So I'm going to ask both of you this, but Jim, let me first turn to you. Exactly what data does the CCP get through TikTok?

LEWIS: It gets personal information on the TikTok users.

And they've been able to push that a little bit and get geolocation, other data. So it's sensitive stuff. Now the Chinese haven't figured out what to do with this information, but we do know that they're collecting it. So there's a potential for a problem down the road.

CHAKRABARTI: So when we say sensitive stuff, it's like personal identification data?

LEWIS: Name, address, phone number, email, you name it, probably other, they collect your voice, they collect your image.

CHAKRABARTI: Location, right?

LEWIS: The whole nine yards. So this is, the Chinese have moved to a data intensive surveillance system in their own country, and now they appear to be pushing it out to at least the U.S. So it's a reasonable concern to say, why is the Chinese government collecting so much data on Americans? What are they going to do with it?

And TikTok is just part of this, but it's that collection that makes people nervous.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let's listen for a moment to what the Chinese government itself said after the house passed this bill. Here's a spokesperson Wang Wenbin from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs at a press conference last week.

WANG WENBIN (TRANSLATION) Even though the U.S. has not found evidence on how TikTok endangers its national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok. Such practice of resorting to acts of bullying when one could not succeed in fair competition disrupts the normal operation of the market. It undermines the confidence of international investors. And sabotages the global economic and trade order. This will eventually backfire on the U.S. itself.

CHAKRABARTI: Emily, respond to that, because as Jim also said, we don't yet know what the Chinese government is doing with this vast amount of data.

So the Chinese therefore say then if you don't know, you can't prove that it's a national security threat.

BAKER-WHITE: I think the Chinese government is probably pretty happy with the fact that the U.S. is having a big fight right now amongst ourselves about what to do about TikTok. I think that supports a lot of the sort of desires that they have for us to question our own systems and to question how we should be making these laws.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So tell me then a bit more, when we say the Chinese government has access to basically all the data that flows through any TikTok users' phone, not just the app, right? Because the apps like look across a person's phone unless you tell it not to. So where is that data first stored? Where does it first go, Emily?

BAKER-WHITE: So there's a two-part dance here. And one is the power that the Chinese government holds over ByteDance, which is TikTok's parent company. ByteDance is a Chinese company and is therefore subject to Chinese law and has to reckon with the Chinese government and deal with the Chinese government.

And then ByteDance has control, as TikTok's parent company, over TikTok. And what TikTok and ByteDance have been trying to do for the past several years is further attenuate the connection between ByteDance and TikTok. To say that they're going to try to cut off access to a lot of that private information of TikTok users to ByteDance employees, but they haven't been able to do that fully.

And because TikTok users' information is and has been accessible by employees at ByteDance, and the Chinese government can order ByteDance to turn it over. That is how the information is getting back potentially to the Chinese government itself.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. So to that point, let's listen to what TikTok CEO, Shou Chew said after the house passed this bill, he took to TikTok itself to share this with American users.

SHOU CHEW: Over the last few years, we have invested to keep your data safe. And our platform free from outside manipulation. We have committed that we will continue to do this legislation, if signed into law, will lead to a ban of TikTok in the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: Jim, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, what Emily and Chew in fact are saying there about TikTok's ongoing efforts to produce some kind of wall between it and the Chinese government.

LEWIS: This is a very confusing discussion, and I was thinking, it's apples and oranges, maybe apples and wonton might be better, but it was fun hearing the Chinese government say we need to do this to defend the market. That's hilarious coming from them. And the TikTok CEO is being a little, what's the right word?

Duplicitous? Because the data is accessible to the Chinese government, and so that's saying I and this very large thug are guarding your data and you should feel safe. It doesn't make any sense. And so much of this debate is the Washington term, as it's Kabuki. So people make claims.

It doesn't make any sense. We could say that about the congressman, too. But in this case, TikTok, it probably does guard your privacy from anyone except the Chinese government. I don't know if that makes you feel better.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm a privacy absolutist. So nothing about digital media makes me feel better, Jim.

But actually, you're bringing up a really interesting point. Because I think at the heart of this, and it cannot be overstated, is that we're not talking about AOL, Instant Messenger. We're talking about TikTok. That, A, has massive market penetration here. Anywhere from 100 to 170 million active American users.

We're talking about almost half the country. And many of them are younger Americans who have grown up in a digital age where, whether they know it or not, they're pretty much at ease with the tradeoff. That comes with being able to use these services, the tradeoff being they get connected with millions of other people, they see content they want, they can create content they want, in exchange for giving up their data, and they are okay with that.

Jim, how do you convince them, if at all possible, that is not a positive?

LEWIS: It's true that social media is a problem, and I'm thinking of writing a book called The Internet is a Cesspool, but this particular case involves the state that is the most aggressive espionage opponent the United States has ever faced. It involves a state that conducts mass surveillance, real mass surveillance, not the stuff we worry about here, against its own people and increasingly against people in other countries. It's a state with a really dodgy record of observing human rights.

And so it's nice that all these people feel comfortable about it. And I think we'll talk later about all their alternatives that will let them continue to do what they want to do. But right now, ByteDance itself could be as pure as the driven snow. Not in Boston, of course, but it could be pure, and it doesn't matter because they live in Beijing and MSS can show up at their door one day and say you must do this.

And that's why we keep going back. The problem here is Chinese ownership. Social media problems. Sure, as we heard, but the problem in this case is Chinese ownership.

CHAKRABARTI: So in that case, do you think that Congressman Auchincloss was right that without the threat of prohibition, that a forced sale would lack teeth?

LEWIS: We had a deal with TikTok and CFIUS in December of 2021, right? Oops. That was a while ago. And the difficulties of moving ahead on this. You've got TikTok's owners are mainly American. That's one of the things that gets left out sometimes. The difficulty of moving ahead with this is, can you name another state that forces companies to sell at a discount to people they like?

That would be Vladimir Putin, so it's not a good precedent. We do have a real problem, but I think divestiture. I've talked to a couple of the potential buyers, and they're huge American corporations, and what they said is, "Hey, we can't afford it. It's too expensive." We'll see if these people on Wall Street can come up with a big pot of money, but forcing TikTok to sale probably makes sense, but you have to do it in a way that doesn't create.

Think of the European Union suddenly took this and said, "Hey, you're right. You're right. Look at Microsoft. We think it should get rid of LinkedIn. That's a divestiture. We're not comfortable." We don't want to set this precedent. So it's a very dicey situation.

CHAKRABARTI: Emily, can you help me understand just a little bit more? I'd love to hear your thoughts on what Jim said. But didn't want to over, or pass over your thinking about that fundamental trade off that especially digital natives have been used to making since they were born.

That's part of this picture and I'd love to know what you think.

BAKER-WHITE: Yeah, it's definitely part of this conversation, though I do think Jim is drawing a distinction that's important. We're having two parallel conversations here. And one is how should we think about being healthy users of the internet in 2024 or 2028 or 2032?

And the other question, is there a unique threat posed by the fact that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company that the Chinese government can lean on? And I think it is better to separate those questions and take them in turn, because the first is complicated and involves a whole bunch of different factors.

And I think lawmakers think the second is a bit more straightforward, which is why we're seeing this bill now. And so I do think for people who think there is a unique threat posed by ByteDance owning TikTok, this bill is supposed to be a solution to that problem. Is that going to cut off the Chinese government's ability to get a bunch of data about us anyway?

They'll have other ways, as Jim said, and I'm sure we can talk about that, but if that is a thing that we want to do, if we want to try to cut that chain off, then I think that's what lawmakers are trying to do in this bill. And then thinking about how to sensibly regulate social media is frankly much more complicated.

CHAKRABARTI: So Jim, though, then tell me how do we think through where the limits are to this kind of legislation when it comes to any technology that's Chinese owned, right? Because TikTok's just the first and most easily recognizable one. But we're living in an age where so much of the technology might be developed here in the United States.

But it's manufactured in China, and it comes back to this country. Are there national security threats there that require some kind of prohibitory legislation?

LEWIS: Unfortunately, the answer is yes. We spent 35 years building a deeply interconnected tech base, deeply interconnected economies, intertwined supply chains.

And, at the time, it seemed like a good idea. Since Xi Jinping's arrival, people have begun to say, and part of it's because Xi says, China's time to dominate the world has come. People are beginning to reexamine the deal we made with China to have an intertwined supply base.

And it turns out TikTok is, to use one of my favorite cliches, the tip of the iceberg. Because Chinese software is in everything, many of the things we use. And so if the product's made in China, if the hardware's made in China, if it connects to the internet, there's risk. And so you're seeing this.

And I'll just give a brief list. The camera company, I think Hikvision, the drone company, DJI, Huawei, you all know about, and now you've got a TikTok. But these are just the big examples. We will have a difficult time disentangling these interconnected supply chains. By the way, the Chinese want to do that too.

They've been trying to get out of the embrace of the United States far before we became aware of it. But it will be a big challenge. The bill is a good recognition of the problem, but not a good set of solutions.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so what we'll do when we come back is we'll talk more about what better solutions might look like.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let's get back to today's conversation, which is about the House passing that bill to possibly ban TikTok. And we asked On Point listeners a couple of days ago what you thought of a proposed ban, and here's some of what you said.

(LISTENER MONTAGE)

BRUCE: In the nearly two years I've been on TikTok, I've live chatted with and made friends from around the globe. I would hate to lose my international connections and hope that we do not finalize a formal ban on the app.

WALLY: It's just another way for them to spy on American citizens. So finally, Congress is doing something right.

MARGARET: The bigger issue is the vast amounts of data that all the social media companies collect surreptitiously. So whatever rulings come out should be applied both to TikTok, but also to Google, Meta, etc.

HUGO: I think that TikTok should not and will not be banned. However, strict restrictions on TikTok should be imposed for the usage of privacy data. So let's be smart. And not give China our privacy data with open arms.

DAN: The app does something for the people. You can get help or guidance on topics that you might be suffering from or worried about. And banning it can really do a lot of damage.

DREW: I think America has some of the best software engineers, market strategists, and creative communities on the planet, so I really don't see why we can't create a robust competitor to TikTok and simply out compete the platform. It seems strange to have the government force a foreign company to sell.

CHAKRABARTI: So you just heard Wally in Massachusetts, Margaret in North Carolina, Hugo in Florida, Dan in Washington, D.C., Drew in Pennsylvania, and we started off there with Bruce, also in Florida. In order to understand if there's a better way forward that can both temper the national security risks, and while also keeping the benefits that people say they find from an app like TikTok, Emily, I'm wondering if we can actually go back in time and see what we can learn from the last time the United States tried this.

Back in 2020, when under the Trump administration, through a series of executive orders, the Trump administration essentially sought to have some kind of ban on TikTok, but a project emerged out of that. Can you just remind us of what that was?

BAKER-WHITE: Yeah, so TikTok started working on something called Project Texas after the attempted Trump ban.

And this was this sort of data sequestration effort, where they were trying to reduce the number of people in China who could access us user data. And they created a new separate TikTok entity for the U.S. called TikTok U.S. Data Services. They have gone through a bunch of efforts to try to sequester at least private information about U.S. TikTok users from the broader TikTok global entity. And this project, Project Texas, was the subject of a year's long negotiation between the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and TikTok.

A draft of the agreement that they were considering finalizing would have given the U.S. government a lot of power over TikTok. They would have been able to come examine their records at any time. They would have been able to have veto power over changes to content policy. They would have had a really unprecedented amount of power over TikTok that they don't have over companies like Meta and Google.

But even with all of that, and with years of negotiation, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the executive branch eventually decided, we don't think we can do this. This still isn't enough. There is no way to separate ownership and control. And to address this issue, we're really going to need ByteDance to divest from TikTok.

CHAKRABARTI: And that came from the committee under President Biden, correct?

BAKER-WHITE: Yes. About 10 months ago, no more, about a year ago. The Biden administration finally went to TikTok and said, "Yeah, you're gonna have to divest. There's no other way."

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, so does that mean Project Texas is dead in the water?

BAKER-WHITE: I don't know if it's completely dead in the water. There were some reports that they might have tried to continue negotiating after CFIUS issued that sort of mandate. But I don't think this new legislation is unrelated to CFIUS's frustration and feeling like it reached a breaking point.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay. So what would you say, Emily, is the lesson to be drawn from that? Separating ownership and control in the way that Project Texas was trying to do was a novel idea anyway. The ownership and control aren't the same thing, right? But Project Texas was an initiative that tried to keep ByteDance owning TikTok and limit ByteDance's influence over TikTok.

And it was a really interesting set of ideas, and you can imagine that if it had worked, if it still somehow does work, it could provide a blueprint for a bunch of other companies that are worried about the same things that TikTok and ByteDance are reckoning with right now. But it was always an experiment, and it seems like it is not terribly likely to work at this point. Given the government's continued concerns, even under a hypothetical Project Texas regime.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Jim, I'm going to come to you in a second, but Emily, again, for those of us who aren't as versed in these companies and the technologies, how would you summarize what sort of undermined the success of Project Texas?

Was it that the Biden administration came back and said, no, this is not enough? Or was it some kind of technical problem? Just give me a quick summary here.

BAKER-WHITE: So I think it was ultimately that the Biden administration came back and said, we're still not satisfied. But just to give you a sense of what Project Texas had to do.

TikTok was built as one of many apps that ByteDance has built, right? ByteDance builds tons of apps all the time in all sorts of jurisdictions. They built TikTok. TikTok was interconnected to all of ByteDance's other apps and all of ByteDance's internal systems. And if you've ever worked at a big tech company, you know that underlying the apps that like regular people in the world use, there are dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of internal tools, internal apps, internal facing apps that employees have to use to route data from here to there, to power analytics dashboards, to power sales pipelines, it's just, there's tons of data flowing around internally that stands up one of these apps of this size.

And I was speaking to one person last year or the year before, and he likened it to untangling a plate of spaghetti, which I thought was a very apt analogy. Just the operational challenge of untangling ByteDance's plate of spaghetti to make sure that nothing from TikTok touches anything else is really hard.

And I think the government was worried, continued to worry can we ever be sure we got it all?

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. That is extremely helpful. So Jim, there's the technological challenges Emily just laid bare in terms of the goals that Project Texas had, but then there's also, I'm not going to call this a challenge.

I'm going to call this a necessary fortification and that is our own constitution when it comes to thought and expression. So I just want to play a little bit from Florida representative Maxwell Frost. He's the only Gen Z member of Congress. And he voted no on the house bill. And here is a clip of what he had to say following the vote.

MAXWELL FROST: I believe that it is an infringement on our first amendment rights, and it violates the constitution. Now I do have to say, am I concerned about American's data? Yes, I am. But this bill does not fix that problem. Let's be honest here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, and here's a response to that criticism from Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher.

He was on CNN last week.

MIKE GALLAGHER: I don't think our bill endangers any First Amendment issues at all. We're talking about foreign ownership and control of an app. And once that foreign ownership is addressed, not only will people be able to continue to say whatever they want on the app, you'll also have freedom of thought, freedom from fear that your thought might be manipulated because of the opaqueness.

CHAKRABARTI: Jim, how do you see the speech and expression concerns here?

LEWIS: First what I'm hearing from people is that Project Texas is a DOA. So we can take that one off the table. Nice as it was. Although people from Texas complain about the name. We're getting into the world of CFIUS and acronyms.

And there's an acronym called FOCI, F O C I, Foreign Ownership Control and Influence. CFIUS was created to deal with that. And so the idea that you could somehow remove ByteDance, reduce its own ownership, control, influence. You could make them a passive investor, right? And so one of the things that's come up is can TikTok U.S. or TikTok global or whatever, can they spin off the American operations?

Can they do an IPO on wall street? China would prefer Shanghai and would that IPO, what does it stand for? The IPO would basically be subject to CFIUS, and at that point, CFIUS could impose mitigation requirements, tracking data, looking for influence, seeing where the personal information went.

That's a good option, but it's going to be difficult. On the constitutional thing, the one thing we can all predict safely is that anything that happens on TikTok is going to go to court for at least a year, right? And the Trump administration's difficult issue. So whether the bill and the potential ban by the House are enough to force Tiktok to move, to put itself on the market in a way that, I talked to some of the global investors who are involved in Tiktok. And I asked one of them, what does the CEO of ByteDance really want?

And what they said is he really wants to be a billionaire and live in London. There's room for a deal there, but it may not be the deal outlined in the bill. It may not be the deal that we've seen on the table, but CFIUS can use its authorities to impose mitigating conditions that would reduce the risk.

But the essential risk is it can't be owned and operated from China.

CHAKRABARTI: Jim, it's heartening to hear that the CEO of TikTok has what seemed to be very human scale desires, actually, but as to your point, it's maybe not the specific CEO that's the issue, but Chinese ownership overall.

Do you see a better way forward that addresses the concerns of people who don't want to lose access to this powerful social media platform, while also addressing the national security concerns.

LEWIS: And that's, I think, Emily's point, which is these apps, there's the surface that you see, you're on your TikTok app, but beneath it, there's a whole layer and layer, layers of software that control it. And how long would it take to disentangle that? I think it can be done, right? It wouldn't happen overnight. It would be something, though, where you could see ByteDance may be moving to passive ownership, maybe giving up control entirely. You could see an IPO for a spinoff that could license some of TikTok software subject to review by U.S. government approved individuals or subject to U.S. government review. To make sure the entanglements Emily was talking about are taken care of.

And that the data isn't going the wrong places and that we don't see influence operations. Very difficult, complex solution, but it is a solution.

CHAKRABARTI: Emily, in the divestiture question, I didn't see anything in the bill that would, say, stop the new owner from being, I don't know, Saudi Arabia, right?

Because it just says no foreign adversaries.

BAKER-WHITE: Yeah. And I think figuring out, my understanding is that the president would have some degree of discretion over whether the foreign adversary issue was resolved or not. But yeah, I think that is a live issue today. My understanding is Saudi Arabia is an investor in Twitter, now X.

And I do think, to bring this back to our earlier conversation, like there are two prongs here and we've been talking about TikTok and the unique issues with TikTok, but there are issues with a bunch of social media companies beyond TikTok.

CHAKRABARTI: Exactly.

BAKER-WHITE: I do want to get to the first amendment points that you were raising before.

If TikTok, to Jim's point, whatever happens with TikTok, it's going to court. And one of the things that the court will try to determine is whether any restriction on TikTok is a content neutral restriction on speech or like a viewpoint sensitive restriction on speech. And TikTok is going to want to say it's viewpoint sensitive and opponents of TikTok are going to want to say it's content neutral.

But if we bring in all of the more general concerns that social media is bad for us, if that is part of this bill, then this looks less like a content neutral restriction. If you want to ban TikTok because you're worried that TikTok is having a bad influence on people, that the content on TikTok is rotting our brains, it's making us dumber.

All of a sudden, you're talking about the content on TikTok. Whereas if you're just talking about the ownership of TikTok, you might be able to stay in that content neutral lane, and that's going to be important down the road.

CHAKRABARTI: Exactly, right? Because Congressman Auchincloss would say that's not in this bill.

In fact, that's what he said earlier, but it is one of their intentions down the road. And so on that point, we've just got 30 seconds left, Jim. What's your thought on that?

If this TikTok problem ever gets resolved, the truth is I would agree with Senator Markey that we have a social or a data privacy problem.

That's a much tougher hill to climb.

LEWIS: So TikTok is a symptom of two big problems. There is a potential solution. But problem one, deeply interconnected supply chain with China that creates risk. We've got to start slowly disentangling and the Biden administration has done an okay job. Second problem, we need a national privacy law.

That's only been true for a couple of decades, but maybe TikTok will help move that along.