Angry teenagers attack politicians. “The phones won’t stop ringing.” The war over TikTok in the US

This week, Republican politician Mike Gallagher introduced a bill in the US Congress that could lead to a complete ban of the TikTok app in the US. If the ban were to go into effect, app stores offering TikTok would face a fine of $5,000 for each user who downloaded the app to their smartphone.

This is my message to TikTok: either break with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to American users. America’s main adversary has no interest in controlling the dominant media platform in the United States. TikTok’s time in the United States will come to an end unless it ends its relationship with KCP-controlled ByteDance

– Gallagher said in a published statement.

The owner of TikTok is the Chinese company ByteDance mentioned by Gallagher. Although it is officially a private entity, accusations of its links with the Chinese government appear from time to time. In February, the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service (Välisluureamet/VLA) published a report, Similar accusations

Importantly, the bill banning TikTok is a bipartisan bill, which means it has a very good chance of gaining broad support in the US House of Representatives. Last year, President Joe Biden and the head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, also spoke positively about this idea. The latter even stated in March 2023 that TikTok was a threat to national security and should be “ended one way or another.”

TikTok calls to the rescue of users

The specter of TikTok being banned in the US made ByteDance decide to make an unprecedented move. On Thursday, American users who launched the application were greeted with the following message:

Congress plans to completely ban TikTok. Speak up now before your government deprives 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free speech. This will harm millions of businesses, destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country, and deprive artists of an audience. Let Congress know what TikTok means to you. Tell them to vote NO

TikTok TikTok

There is a red “Call now” button below the message. After clicking the button, users are asked to enter their zip code to find members of the House of Representatives living in their area. After entering the code, users are shown the phone number of a specific politician, along with a prompt to call him and tell him to “stop the TikTok ban.”

, many TikTok users took advantage of this opportunity. Many politicians complained Thursday of receiving hundreds of calls from angry voters.

It’s bad. Our phones don’t stop ringing. We are contacted by teenagers and older people who say they spend all day on the app and we can’t take that away from them

– said one member of the Republican Party in an interview with Politico. An employee in another politician’s office even complained that he received over 1,000 calls on Thursday, most of them related to the TikTok case.

If you block TikTok, I will kill myself

– one of the callers allegedly threatened.

Politicians of the Democratic Party also receive calls from TikTok users. “Most of the calls come from children” –

The author of the bill, Mike Gallagher, commented on the message displayed by TikTok. A member of the House of Representatives stated that ByteDance is lying to users. “If you actually read the draft bill, you will see that it is not about a ban, but about divestment,” he said. He added that the project “entirely leaves TikTok to decide whether to sever ties with the Chinese Communist Party.” If ByteDance sells the application, “Tik Tok will survive,” Gallagher emphasized.