As national security officials prepare to brief senators on Wednesday about threats posed by TikTok, lawmakers questioned whether a forced sale of the Chinese-owned social media platform could lead to a different kind of foreign ownership.
The closed-door briefing on Wednesday comes after the House passed a bill to push ByteDance to divest within six months or face being banned in the United States. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Commerce Committee will have access to the briefing as the Senate considers how to proceed on the House-passed bill.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said he has already received the briefing but hopes other members will understand the threat the app poses. Rubio and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), chairman of the committee, came out in support of the House’s bill a week ago.
“I hope other members who haven’t followed this as closely because they haven’t been on the committee, who are on Commerce, I hope they will either understand the threat that this poses and the threat that ByteDance can be weaponized against the United States for informational warfare,” Rubio said, speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
“Hopefully people will leave there with the same perceptions that House members left a similar briefing a week ago,” Rubio added.
The goal of the briefing is to convince senators that the appropriate move is to divest the application from its Chinese parent company ByteDance instead of a full ban in the country, according to a source briefed on the matter.
Even though the Senate has not committed to take up the bill just yet, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he’s interested in pulling together a group of investors to buy ByteDance, although he did not say who exactly would be part of that group.
However, many believe it could be coming from investors in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, where Mnuchin raised a $2.5 billion investment fund after leaving office, according to reporting from Semafor. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, criticized the former secretary and his ties to money from the Middle East.
“No one is denying that more needs to be done to protect Americans from foreign governments looking to harvest their private data,” Wyden wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Letting a Trump crony buy up social media platforms with Saudi funding isn’t the way to do it.”
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) did not have as strong of criticism as Wyden, explaining he’d prefer to see the social media platform separated from foreign ownership.
“I’d like to see no foreign ownership, but obviously there has been a propensity and concern about how that information would be used against our interests,” Cardin said, responding to a question from the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “I think I’d feel more comfortable if there was no foreign ownership.”
Rubio had a different take, explaining that any buyer would be better than one that is subject to the national security laws of Beijing.
“At the end of the day, that doesn’t mean their buyer is going to be some people that we are going to be nominating for sainthood in the Catholic church, but we are looking for someone who’s not subject to the national security laws of Beijing,” Rubio said.
“They may not be nice people, but that’s not really the goal here. It’s not to determine who the owner is or that the owner has to be someone who is housed in a perfect country. It’s to prevent the fastest growing social media company in America being driven from an algorithm that has to be whatever the Chinese Communist Party says it has to be by law, by the Chinese law,” he added.
Senators on both sides of the aisle are signaling they’re conflicted about the legislation amid concerns about constitutional rights to free expression, backlash from young voters in a critical election year, and opposition to the proposal from former President Donald Trump.
“The House bill, I’m very sympathetic to; I want to see us get a bill passed,” Cardin said but expressed he hasn’t read all the specifics of the bill so was unsure of whether he’d support it in its current form.
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“I don’t want to give you all the specifics, but the idea of putting guardrails in regards to American information to me is important,” he added.
So far, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has not committed to holding a vote on the bill and only said the upper chamber planned to review the legislation after the bill passed in the House last week.
