Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-St. Louis) doesn’t often agree with former President Donald Trump, but they currently find themselves aligned on at least one issue: TikTok.
This morning, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would force the social media app’s parent company, the China-based ByteDance, to either spin TikTok into its own entity with a non-Chinese owner or have the app banned in the United States.
The bill passed 352 to 65 with broad support from both sides. Bush was one of 50 Democrats to vote against it, joined by frequent allies Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Pramila Jayapa (D-Washington), among others.
All the other members of Missouri’s delegation to the House of Representatives supported the bill, minus Ann Wagner (R-Ballwin), who didn’t vote one way or the other.
“This is not responsible governance. Instead of targeting one company, Congress should enact comprehensive data privacy legislation,” Bush wrote on Twitter this afternoon, explaining her “no” vote.
Bush has previously said she does have privacy and misinformation concerns about TikTok, but she has similar concerns about Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, too.
The bill that passed this morning was born out of fears stemming from ByteDance’s close relationship with the government of China, raising data privacy and national security concerns.
Trump’s own reasons for encouraging representatives to vote against the bill are fairly mercurial, though they may have something to do with a recent meeting he had with billionaire TikTok investor Jeff Yass. The former president had previously been highly critical of the Chinese-owned company before suddenly switching course.
On the subject of a TikTok ban, “I could have got it done if I wanted to,” Trump said Monday on CNBC. “Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
The bill is far from a done deal. It still needs to pass the Senate before it heads to President Joe Biden for his signature.
Senator Josh Hawley, in what is also an out-of-character move vis-a-vis Trump, has broken with the former president in encouraging the Senate to pass the bill immediately.
Biden says he is all for it. “If they pass it, I’ll sign it,” he told reporters last week.
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