Democrats Join TikTok Creators at Capitol Hill to Protest Possible Nationwide Ban

As the leader faces mounting pressure, lots of TikTok developers descended on Capitol Hill on March 22 in an effort to convince the Biden administration neither to outlaw the Chinese-owned social media app.

Reps. Jamaal Bowman( D – N) joined the authors, many of whom were waving signals that read” Keep TikTok.” Y. Robert Garcia( D – Calif. ) and Mark Pocan, both of Wisconsin, held a press conference outside the Capitol to talk about their opposition to the potential ban.

Free speech was cited by politicians as one of the justifications for keeping the Beijing-based ByteDance application in place.

According to Bowman,” Our First Amendment gives us the right to talk openly and to communicate openly, and TikTok has established a place and sacrament for free conversation for 150 million Americans and counting.” Many of the content producers I even met in my work fall under that category.

The Democrat continued by saying that the platform’s content producers had referred to the game as a” life” and” a site that is useful to their mental health and wellbeing.”

Additionally, he referred to the platform as an” educational tool” where teachers and professors can interact with students and as a place where” 5 million small businesses are selling their products and services and making livings— making money in our economy is struggling in so many ways.”

Considerations for federal protection

Pocan, who also spoke to the masses, claimed that there is a serious issue with facts and misinformation on social marketing in general.

He said to the crowd, which was primarily made up of content developers and the push,” That’s what we should make addressing.” But that’s not what we’re doing, as I all quite frequently observe. Instead of the really important matters that Congress should address, the discussion has shifted to whether or not to ban a simple system.

U.S. officials are becoming more and more concerned that the game poses a threat to national security, which is why the press event is taking place. According to some officials, the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) may be able to obtain data on users in the United States and use the app to spread propaganda.

As a result, both the US and the UK have also outlawed the game from official devices. However, due to data problems, the Biden presidency has issued a warning that the government does outlaw the app globally if ByteDance doesn’t buy its video game play.

ByteDance has vehemently denied that Beijing receives TikTok content. According to the organization, U.S. user data is kept on outside outside of China. However, in recent weeks after a CCP detective bubble was downed over the United States, Chinese surveillance concerns have grown even more intense.

The RESTRICT Act( pdf ), a bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate, was proposed by lawmakers earlier in March as an expansion of the Biden administration’s power to enact an overall ban on TikTok.

The proposal gives the Commerce Department new authority to find and outlaw international technological products that endanger the country’s security. Any risk arising from any covered transfer by any woman, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, may be required to be” identified, hinder, destroy, avoid, prohibit, investigate, then mitigated” by the secretary of commerce.

CEO of TikTok addresses politicians

Garcia acknowledged on Twitter that he and the public have a lot in common regarding TikTok’s security and privacy.

However, the game is used by more than 100 million Americans, many of whom support small businesses and significant economic reasons. We should strive to find a method that addresses issues and keeps the game available in the United States. The legislator wrote,” S.”

The event took place outside the Capitol the day before TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was scheduled to testify about the privacy data, facts, and impact on children before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 23.

Prior to giving his testimony, Chew posted a minute-long game to the standard ByteDance TikTok account on the site, informing users that” some lawmakers have started talking about banning tiptok.”

Today, all 150 million of you could lose access to TikTok as a result of this. He said in the game before urging customers to inform their national staff” what you love” about the game,” I’ll make testifying before Congress later this week to discuss all that we are doing to protect Americans using it.”