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WASHINGTON — It's possible that the Senate could change the bill requiring TikTok to divest from ByteDance by lengthening the time the company would have to complete the forced sale.
In a nutshell, the House passed a bill that would require TikTok to divest from ByteDance within six months or else it would effectively face a ban. The bill could apply to more than just TikTok, as it allows the executive branch to determine if other companies fit the specified criteria for a threat to national security and also force a sale.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told The Wall Street Journal that she's open to extending the period outlined in the bill, which is currently set at six months. This could "give you the ability to actually do a transaction and maybe have a little bit more, not stability, but find the right divestiture," she told the outlet.
It's unclear how much the Senate bill will differ from the version the House passed earlier this spring. The bill enjoyed bipartisan support, including from Utah's House delegation, but in the Senate, it has faced more criticism ranging from First Amendment concerns to issues with the amount of power it would give the executive branch.
As it stands, the House version of the bill would allocate power to the executive branch to determine if an app was a threat to national security based on certain parameters and force a sale of the app. Critics of the bill, including Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, take issue with this facet of the bill.
Supporters of the bill have pointed toward other similar regulations.
FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel recently made her support of the bill known, Deadline reported. "We don't have authority over apps like TikTok," Rosenworcel reportedly said. "That being said, what strikes me most is that for decades we've had policies in the Communications Act that would prevent, for instance, a Chinese national or a Chinese company from owning our nation's broadcast television stations."
"We would say that's unacceptable, right?" Rosenworcel continued. "I'd be kicked out of my job if I decided otherwise. And yet here we have something that's arguably one (of) the newer forms of media and there is zero oversight. I think that is stunning."
TikTok itself opposes the bill and previously told the Deseret News, "This will damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country."
Unlike other attempts to cull social media across the country, this bill targets the issue of national security rather than the issue of mental health.
Politicians have been told about the potential national security threats in classified briefings, so the public doesn't have a first row seat to the specifics of those threats. Axios reported on one such briefing where two senators, whose names were not given in the story, said that what they heard involved how TikTok tracks and harvests user data.
How TikTok handles data has been at the center of the conversation and there are existing questions around that issue.
TikTok executives came up with the idea of Project Texas, which would completely separate U.S. data from the rest of company to assuage lawmakers' concerns around how the company handles data.
"The bottom line is this is American data, stored on American soil by an American company, overseen by American personnel," TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before the Congress. "This eliminates the concern that some of you have shared with me that TikTok user data can be subject to Chinese law."
According to The Wall Street Journal, as of January, "TikTok is struggling to live up to those promises."
The Journal reported that "managers sometimes instruct workers to share data with colleagues in other parts of the company and with ByteDance workers without going through official channels, according to current and former employees and internal documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal." Reportedly this data includes birthdates and IP addresses.
Former TikTok employees told Fortune said "at least some of TikTok's operations were intertwined with its parent during their tenures, and that the company's independence from China was largely cosmetic."
