Biden Campaign Team Will Keep Using TikTok After He Signed Bill That Could Ban App

Last updated on August 7th, 2024 at 04:29 pm

President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign team said it will continue to use the TikTok social media app, even after Biden signed legislation on Wednesday that will force TikTok to part ways with Chinese investors or lose access to the U.S. market.

Various news publications, including The Hill and Financial Times, reported Biden campaign officials have no plans to leave the TikTok app.

“When the stakes are this high in the election, we are going to use every tool we have to reach young voters where they are,” a Biden campaign official told The Hill on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the president signed legislation directly impacting TikTok’s current corporate structure.

The bill prohibits technology applications deemed sufficiently owned or controlled by individuals within an adversary country—namely China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea—from operating within the United States.

The legislation Biden signed states an application is deemed to be a “foreign adversary controlled” technology if it is either domiciled, headquartered in, or organized under the domestic laws of the aforementioned adversary countries; or a company in which a person, entity, or combination of persons or entities in the listed countries have a combined ownership stake of 20 percent or more; or is otherwise “subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity.”

The legislation does not provide further language for determining when an application is “subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity” but gives the president authority to determine whether an application poses a risk.

Applications deemed to be “foreign adversary controlled” have 270 days to change their ownership structure, through a qualifying divestiture which is determined by the president and an interagency group. The president may grant a one time extension of up to 90 for a “foreign adversary controlled” application to complete its divestiture, so long as it has already identified a path and shown progress toward that divestiture.

Once the divestiture period lapses, the legislation states any websites or app stores that continue to host a prohibited application will face fines of up to $5,000 per U.S. user per day; raising costs for third-party services to continue serving the application far above any potential monetary gain they might receive.

TikTok, and its parent company ByteDance, are specifically described in the bill as qualifying “foreign adversary controlled” entities warranting a ban. In arguing for the law’s passage, lawmakers had raised concerns about TikTok’s user data collection practices and allegations that its parent company ByteDance works too closely with the Chinese government.

Biden previously passed the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” in December of 2022, generally prohibiting the use of the app on devices owned by the federal government.  Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Rick Scott (R-FL) had raised alarm about the risk of the Chinese government influencing the operations of the TikTok application and harvesting U.S. user data, when they first introduced that legislation in 2020.

The Biden campaign official told The Hill they are using “enhanced security measures” as they operate their TikTok account.

With the timing of the bill’s signing on Wednesday, TikTok’s divestiture window will close sometime in January 2025, assuming no further delays brought about by litigation or a 90-day extension of the divestiture timeline. That allows the Biden campaign to keep connecting with TikTok’s user base through the end of the 2024 election cycle before his legislative decision shuts down the platform.