Decoding the Legislation That Could End TikTok's Reign
Mar 14, 2024Season 3Episode 147
Julie Barrett
Could the era of TikTok in America really be ticking away? Join me, as I dissect the buzz about HR 7521, the legislation that could change the social media landscape as we know it.
Could the era of TikTok in America really be ticking away? Join me, as I dissect the buzz about HR 7521, the legislation that could change the social media landscape as we know it.
Well, the hottest topic right now is all about the so-called TikTok ban. What is it? What does it do? What's happening? Are we going to lose TikTok? Let's get into it. Hi, I'm Julie Barrett and you're listening to the Women's Planing Podcast. I'm also the founder of Conservative Ladies of America, which started in Washington state. As conservative ladies of Washington, we are an organization of like-minded ladies and gentlemen who are working to encourage, empower and equip citizens to stand up, speak up and take real action to create change in your local community, your state or even on a federal level. You can learn more about the work that we do and how you can get involved by visiting our website at conservativeladiesofamericacom. I will also have all of that linked in the notes for you as well. Well, let's get into this whole TikTok ban bill. The bill number on this is HR 7521, and I will have a link to that bill text for you if you like to geek out on that sort of thing in the show notes.
Speaker 1:
But you probably have heard of it as the TikTok ban and I was watching. I was scrolling through some reels on Facebook a couple of days ago and I don't have TikTok downloaded on any of my devices. I don't even use the website. I never have. I just from day one. I just didn't want that downloaded on my devices. And, yes, I realized that Facebook, instagram, x and all of these apps are tracking us and gathering our data and all of that. But I just decided against TikTok, so I don't even have it. So I'm scrolling through Facebook reels watching some influencers, and I heard multiple people say that after Wednesday, tiktok might go away. So make sure that you're following me on, you know, whatever other platform. And so I had this realization of how many citizens, how many ordinary citizens just going about our daily lives, do not have an understanding of how our government process works and the simple understanding of how a bill becomes a law. So just really quickly, let's go over the status of HR 7521, aka the TikTok ban.
Speaker 1:
So this bill had a vote yesterday, wednesday March 13, in the House of Representatives in Congress. So this is a federal level bill. It will affect the entire country and it was passed. It's a bipartisan bill, very strong bipartisan support on both sides, and it was passed with the exception of just 65 representatives voting no on this bill, and only 15 of them were Republicans, and I'm going to link the roll call. If you're curious how your representative voted in the notes below so you can go look that up my representative, greg Stubey, here in Sarasota. He voted no, as did Matt Gates, who is also from Florida, as well as Marjorie Taylor Green from Georgia. I know we had one other from Florida I forget who it was off the top of my head but there were three Congress people from Florida that voted against this, but by and large it was, you know, democrats against it. It was 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans, and so it's kind of weird that my conservative congressman is voting in the same way that some of the radical left Democrats from my former home state of Washington, like Pramila Jayapal and Rick Larson, both voted no. So it's kind of weird to have them on the same side.
Speaker 1:
But what really caught my attention about this bill prior to the vote was a Twitter post by Congressman Thomas Massey from Kentucky, and he posted some screenshots of the bill, which is typically what a lot of people miss. They don't actually get into the text of the bill and so they miss a lot of the details. I'm going to read you a portion of the text of the bill. So, foreign adversary controlled application. The term foreign adversary.
Speaker 1:
Controlled application means a website, desktop application, mobile application or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated directly or indirectly, including through a parent company or subsidiary or affiliate. So it's not, we're not just talking about the TikTok app, we're talking about websites, desktop applications. So this you know, if you are actually reading the text of the bill, it's pretty broad. So rep Massey calls this TikTok ban atrocious horse. It will give the president the power to ban websites, not just apps, which is very concerning and very problematic. And it doesn't have to be just offshore, it doesn't have to be just foreign, and you'll hear in this clip that Tucker just released with Senator Rand Paul TikTok is not exactly owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker 2:
You know, my concern has always been with the centralization of power, with giving up power. I don't care whether it's a Republican or a Democrat president. I don't want any president to have the power to ban apps that are sold on an app store. And that's essentially what this is going to happen. 180 million Americans put dance videos up and whatever else is on TikTok and they choose the terms of the service the same way people on Facebook do. And does Facebook scrape your data? Sure, does Google scrape your data? Do all of these soft, these giant tech companies, scrape your data? They all take your data.
Speaker 2:
But the thing is is there are now accusations they say, oh, tiktok's owned by the Chinese government. The Chinese Communist own it. Well, that's not even true. You can't say stuff just over and over again. That's not true. Tiktok is owned by about 60% of its own, by international investors from all over the world. 20% is owned by the two Chinese software engineers that created the app and 20% is owned by the employees of TikTok, which 7,000 of them are Americans. So there's a significant nexus of Americans in the ownership, and then there's a significant nexus of Americans using this and they say, oh, the Chinese government owns it. It's just frankly not true. Now the company that owns TikTok also owns something like TikTok. That is censored and the Chinese let that be broadcast throughout China. The Chinese government does have a member of the board. It's called Doyin. It's the Chinese TikTok, but they don't have a member of the board of ByteDance. They don't control ByteDance and the data is now kept in Oracle Cloud centered in Texas, and this has been done because the company wants to try to exist. It's a very popular app. It has a great deal of value, so they're doing anything they can to comply and yet the hysterics in the house are just shut them down, shut them down.
Speaker 2:
Communism, this communism, that. Look, I've written two books about Chinese communism and what it does, both during the COVID leak and also what it did during Mao's reign. So I am no fan of Chinese communism. But at the same time, we can't sort of, like you know, emulate the Chinese to try to protect our way of life, becoming like the Chinese in banning things. Tiktok is banned in China. They don't have TikTok. They have a censored version in China that the Chinese government does control, but they don't control TikTok over here. If we ban TikTok, we're simply becoming and acting like the Chinese.
Speaker 1:
All of this was actually new information to me. I didn't realize that there were so many different entities involved in the ownership of TikTok. Not that it changes my perspective on it or that I would download it, but it's interesting when you look at the makeup of the company and then take all that into account with this so called ban, I think this is a very dangerous policy that's so broad and will allow the president, whoever is in power, to have really this unilateral power to force the sale or banning of an app or a website that they don't like. So that is extremely concerning. My representative, greg Stubbe, went on I forget what show it was, but he went on last night to discuss his thoughts about that.
Speaker 3:
In the last paragraph. One of the things that they can do is they can go after and I'm quoting directly from the bill a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity. Exactly what does that mean? I'm a lawyer. And they say that about conservatives all the time. Yes, and they just talked about the fact that they did it about Elon Musk.
Speaker 3:
They did it about Trump and Russia collusion so who's to say that this president, joe Biden, isn't going to say that truth social is influenced by somebody in Russia or the Chinese Communist Party? And now, this new power that's been given to President Biden, he's going to shut down and divest truth social from being able to communicate to their base eight months before an election. I mean, the timing of all this is also very suspect. I mean, I agree with you.
Speaker 1:
So there's a lot of different angles with this bill that are concerning. Dan Crenshaw is very much in support of this bill. He says on a tweet that he did yesterday. We just passed legislation out of the house that will separate TikTok from the Chinese Communist Party. You've probably heard lies that this bill is a Trojan horse or that it doesn't solve every problem on planet Earth. The truth is, this bill just says that TikTok can't be owned by our enemies. I voted hell yes. The current owner of TikTok, bite Dance, is a Chinese company. They're bound by Chinese surveillance law to give American data to the CCP.
Speaker 1:
So, as we already heard from Senator Rand Paul, we heard a different story. So which one is it? Is it that TikTok is owned by a number of different people, including, sounds like 7,000 Americans have an investment into TikTok? So I find this really discouraging because, well, I tend not to believe Dan Crenshaw over Rand Paul, thomas Massey and Greg Stubbe, but I do find it's part of a bigger issue of we, the people, we the American citizens. We don't really know who we can trust. We don't know who is telling the truth. We don't know who is funding these different policies.
Speaker 1:
There was some information that I saw today on X sorry, I keep calling it X and Twitter and interchangeably, so you guys know what I mean. But I heard some information, or read some information earlier today, that there's some conservative billionaire that's behind this and he's been donating to all the people that voted no, and that really doesn't make sense to me, because you only had 15 Republicans that voted no. So it was an easy pass, with it being bipartisan, and it looks like it will be an easy pass out of the Senate as well. So, kind of circling back to how I started with this as how a bill becomes a law, and a lot of people thinking that after this bill was voted on and passed out of the house, all of a sudden TikTok's going to be banned and all of these influencers will lose their followers and their content. That's not how bills become law. So for the people that don't really understand and I'm not throwing any shade, because three years ago I probably wouldn't have remembered my high school civics lessons either and so where the bill goes next, now that it has passed out of the house, it will go over to the Senate, it will go through committees and then eventually it will get a full floor vote in the Senate, which I would assume that it will get passed out of the Senate and then it will go to Joe Biden to be signed into law.
Speaker 1:
There are a number of actions that citizens can take if they support or oppose this bill. You can reach out to your senators I'm not sure what committee it will go to next, but you could reach out to the senators that are on that committee. What the best thing to do is reach out by phone or via email to your senator and Ask them to vote the way that you want. I personally oppose this bill because I see that it could be a big infringement upon our First Amendment rights. I personally believe that we need to take responsibility for the information that we are downloading on our phone, the applications that we're using. We have to take personal responsibility for that and, especially with our children. Your children shouldn't be downloading apps that you don't want them to download, and parents need to have a spine about that and say you know what? We're not doing any social media or we're only doing, you know, instagram or whatever it is. I think you know they're probably all bad for kids, but how do you put the toothpaste back in the bottle at this point.
Speaker 1:
But I think that we are free people that are free to make our decisions and to me I see this as big government telling us what we can and can't do and overseeing what we should and shouldn't be having on our having access to. So I disagree with it from that standpoint and I also tend to find Thomas Massey, rand Paul and Greg Stubbe, as well as some of these others, matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor-Green. I find them to be pretty credible. I guess I would believe them over some of these other people. And you know, it's just, it's just discouraging because you just don't know who to believe. You know all of these people have special interests and money and you know behind them and driving their decisions. So it's really frustrating from from that aspect. But I think we just have to do as much information gathering as possible and then make our best informed decision from that information that we have.
Speaker 1:
So I'm gonna have links to all of these posts on X, all of these videos, so that you can watch them in full. I'll have all of those linked up in the notes for you if you want to go dig through them yourself. But the moral of the story is TikTok is not being banned, at least not right now. And it would, they would have to when this law passes. They'll have to abide by certain conditions to keep the app up. It wouldn't just like TikTok won't just go away, so everybody can rest easy that's concerned about losing their TikTok account. So anyway, thanks for letting me geek out on this bill with you. I hope you learned a little something today. If you have thoughts on this particular bill, I would love to hear from you. All of the contact information for me is also linked in the show notes and I look forward to chatting with you again next time.
