Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), two of the Senate’s most prominent conservatives, clashed on the floor Wednesday when Hawley requested unanimous consent to pass his bill to effectively bar TikTok from operating in the United States.
Hawley’s bill would do so by imposing sanctions on TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Limited.
The Missouri senator cited a recent report by The New York Times that TikTok engineers based in China have accessed the driver’s licenses, addresses and photos of TikTok users despite the repeated assurances of TikTok executives that China would not have access to Americans’ data.
Hawley pointed out that the Chinese law requires corporations make their information and data available to the People’s Republic of China’s government on request.
And he noted that young people are especially vulnerable to data collection by the Chinese-owned social media app, which he called “a back door for the Chinese Communist Party to track the keystrokes, the information of every American who has the app on their phone.”
“It is time to put an end to this,” Hawley declared on the Senate floor, noting that Congress voted last year to strip TikTok off every government device. “It’s time we took the step to protect the American people, to protect the integrity of Americans’ personal information and their personal privacy.”
But Hawley’s request was slapped down by Paul, a libertarian-leaning conservative, who also objected to moving the same bill on the floor in March.
“If there is a better national strategy to permanently lose elections for a generation, I’ve not heard of it,” Paul argued, pointing to the app’s huge popularity with young people.
“Banning TikTok, a social media app used by primarily young Americans, is a recipe for electoral disaster for Republicans,” Paul said, noting that 71 percent of young women and 53 percent of young men voted for Democratic candidates for Congress in last year’s midterm election.
Paul suggested Hawley was promoting censorship and compared it to “McCarthyist paranoia.”
“The banning TikTok strategy … comes while the GOP simultaneously complains of liberal U.S. social media companies canceling and censoring conservatives. So without a hint of irony, many of these same, quote, conservatives now agitate to censor viewpoints they don’t like,” Paul said.
“The concern over TikTok seems to be over what the social media might do, propagating hysteria and fear of subtle communist subversion from the People’s Republic of China,” he said.
Paul said the better solution to combat the influence of TikTok is to “counter flawed ideas or falsities with more speech and better arguments.”
“Do we really want to emulate China’s speech bans. Do we want to intrude on the lives of Americans, deprive them of their First Amendment right to receive and consider information?” he asked.
Hawley in return did not appreciate Paul’s claim that his proposal would crack down on free speech.
“Let’s just be clear about one thing. The Chinese Communist government is not covered by the United States’s Bill of Rights. The Chinese Communist government does not have free speech rights, and we’re not talking about free speech. We’re not talking about speech at all,” he retorted on the floor.
He said the proposed sanctions “have nothing to do with speech” and “have everything to do with spying,” pointing out that the U.S. government has already banned the sale or import of equipment from the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies.
“The reason to ban TikTok in this country is that it is a spying apparatus,” Hawley said.
Hawley sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday urging the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to conclude its review of TikTok and ban all ByteDance-controlled apps now available to U.S. users.
Halwey has criticized the app for handling pro-Hamas propaganda since the outbreak of war in Israel. He recently noted that 51 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians was justified.
On Wednesday, he highlighted pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses and pro-Hamas rhetoric being chanted by high school students.
“Where are they being fed this propaganda?” he asked. “They’re finding it on TikTok.”
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