The bill coming to a vote this week would force the app’s Chinese parent company to divest—or risk a U.S. ban.

TikTok is under fire again in Washington. A bill that would force Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the popular video app or risk a U.S. ban advanced unopposed from the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce last week. However, there may be division in the Republican camp, after former U.S. President Donald Trump flipped and came out against the ban on Monday, after meeting with billionaire Jeff Yass, a TikTok investor.

Trump’s U-turn still seems unlikely to be enough to stop the full congressional vote on the bill from passing with a two-thirds majority on Wednesday. It would still have to pass the Senate, but U.S. President Joe Biden has promised to sign it into law if it does.

TikTok has repeatedly described the bill as an outright ban, which is not true. But it will be an effective ban if ByteDance doesn’t sell. The firm would face being kicked out of platforms such as the App Store, with Apple and other firms fearing massive fines. Speaking with U.S. China policy staffers in the last week, the consensus was that TikTok was doomed in the United States. 

There was also general agreement that TikTok’s fate is a good thinggiven its risks, from China’s access to U.S. users’ data to the threat of election interference. Leaked documents show that TikTok bends its own algorithms to censor videos worldwide. The app is unpopular on Capitol Hill, where CEO Shou Zi Chew’s testimony, both last year and in January, was widely seen as disingenuous.

A TikTok campaign that encouraged U.S. users to call their political representatives and protest the bill seemed to worsen the situation. As communications expert Lulu Cheng Meservey pointed out, the strategy may have worked for a U.S. company, but it was counterproductive for a Chinese one—especially when many TikTok users can’t vote yet. Chinese propagandists such as Hu Xijinchiming in only handed TikTok’s opponents more ammunition.

There has been a bipartisan desire to take action against TikTok since at least 2019, and efforts to force ByteDance’s divestment go back to 2020. Yet it’s taken five years to become a possibility, in part because of the incompetence of the Trump administration and the transition to the Biden White House. Lobbying has played its part too: TikTok has poured resources into getting access in Washington. There is no doubt a barrage of legal challenges ahead.

However, one big change in the lobbying environment is that most Western technology firms are no longer interested in carrying water for China. Companies such as Meta were once keen to find a way into the Chinese market or keep their limited access open. Those prospects have dimmed. Even Apple, still dependent on the Chinese market, has seen sales of key products dip thanks in part to pressurefrom Beijing. If ByteDance sells TikTok, some Western executives seem eager to pick it up.

It seems unlikely that will happen, though. ByteDance can’t act in its own financial interests. Like all Chinese companies, even private ones, it is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The last time authorities slapped down the firm—banning its humor app, Neihan Duanzi, in 2018—ByteDance’s CEO put out a self-abnegating letter full of praise for the CCP. Since then, the party has made its control over tech companies even clearer.

An U.S.-owned TikTok is useless to the CCP, even if its sale would make ByteDance billions of dollars. An app that’s effectively banned from the United States, however, both gives China a useful propaganda vector for much of the rest of the world and lets it play the victim over free speech for once.

That is of course hypocritical, given that TikTok is inaccessiblewithin China. The Chinese version of the app, Douyin, has different content and rules, explicitly operating under China’s ever-tightening censorship.

Excerpts: Foreign Policy