Chicago influencer Jen White has almost 100,000 TikTok Followers. Now she is concerned that the platform she has come to love may effectively be banned after a vote Wednesday morning by the House of Representatives.
“I mean it’s a loss of income, really, because I have lost that opportunity,” she said after learning that the chamber had voted 352 to 65 in support of a measure that was designed to pressure TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the social media platform or face an effective ban in the United States.
Why might TikTok be banned? Internet serial entrepreneur Dominick Miserandino said there is concern because of the amount and types of data the platform collects from its users. “With the Chinese government, what if they are looking at voting interests, what if you are following a certain political candidate and you are living in a certain area?” he asked. “Is that information of value to another country?” Virginia Democrat Mark Warner said China could use TikTok's powerful algorithms to "feed its users political propaganda."
TikTok has repeatedly denied that it operates at the service of the Chinese government. It says the company is 60% owned by global, institutional investors, adding that they have spent more than $1 billion to on a plan to store U.S. user data on servers operated by American cloud computing giant Oracle.
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“Our intention is for TikTok to continue to operate, but not under the control of the Chinese Communist Party,” Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi, one of the bill’s sponsors, said.
TikTok has 170 million users in the U.S. alone. It is a valuable property but one that may be hard for ByteDance to sell. One option may be to spin TikTok off through an initial public offering on the stock market.
The future of the House bill is also uncertain, with no promise that it will be called to a vote in the Senate.
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Donald Trump, who initially supported a ban, may now be changing his mind. President Biden says he would sign it even though he is currently using the TikTok platform in his re-election campaign.
“It’s hard to believe TikTok is really going anywhere,” Dana Joelle, another Chicago-based influencer said. “There’s too much money involved with the app and too many big businesses with skin in the game. It will either be sold or won’t pass in the Senate," she said.
White said she won’t be happy if TikTok is banned. “I hope it doesn’t happen because I have built a community of people and I have built a business, and I hope that doesn’t all go away."
