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TikTok is now disputing a Reuters report that claims the short-video app is cloning its algorithm to potentially offer a different version of the app, which might degrade over time, just for US users.

Sources "with direct knowledge" of the project—granted anonymity because they're not authorized to discuss it publicly—told Reuters that the TikTok effort began late last year. They said that the project will likely take a year to complete, requiring hundreds of engineers to separate millions of lines of code.

As these sources reported, TikTok's tremendous undertaking could potentially help prepare its China-based owner ByteDance to appease US lawmakers who passed a law in April forcing TikTok to sell its US-based operations by January 19 or face a ban. But TikTok has maintained that the "qualified divestiture" required by the law would be impossible, and on Thursday, TikTok denied the accuracy of Reuters' report while reiterating its stance that a sale is not in the cards.

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Apparently, the TikTok ban bill is back.

Speaker Mike Johnson plans to include TikTok divestiture legislation already passed by the House in a fast-moving aid package for Ukraine and Israel that the chamber is set to clear on Saturday. The Senate is expected to quickly take up the measure, and President Joe Biden promised Wednesday to sign it immediately.

If signed into law, the bill would deliver a significant blow to a video-sharing app used by as many as 170 million Americans. Its enactment would also mark a major setback to the company’s intense lobbying efforts, especially by Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew, who made the rounds on Capitol Hill last month in a bid to get the Senate to squelch the legislation.

I’ve already explained why the TikTok ban is both unconstitutional and would not do anything to fix the “concerns” that people have raised about it. We’ve also discussed how those most vocally pushing for the TikTok ban appear to be financially conflicted.

But, even more important than all that, is that a TikTok ban would be a disaster for the open web. Yes, other countries have banned apps, but they tend to be authoritarian countries that have never liked and never supported an open web.

Banning an entire app in the US would be a massive attack on the very concept of an open web. And that’s really unfortunate, given that the US used to be the world’s most vocal supporter of the web being kept open and free.

The New York Times recently had a good article calling out what a disaster the ban would be for the open web.

Digital rights groups and others around the world have taken notice — and raised the question of how the moves against TikTok contradict the United States’ arguments in favor of an open internet.

A Russian opposition blogger, Aleksandr Gorbunov, posted on social media last month that Russia could use the move to shut down services like YouTube. And digital rights advocates globally are expressing fears of a ripple effect, with the United States providing cover for authoritarians who want to censor the internet.

In March, the Chinese government, which controls its country’s internet, said America had “one way of saying and doing things about the United States, and another way of saying and doing things about other countries,” citing the TikTok legislation.

Passing the TikTok ban would effectively be telling the world (1) it’s totally okay to ban apps you don’t like, and (2) the U.S. long-standing commitment to the open web was always fake and always bullshit, because the second a successful foreign app came along, we tossed out those principles.

“It would diminish the U.S.’s standing in promoting internet freedom,” said Juan Carlos Lara, the executive director of Derechos Digitales, a Latin American digital rights group based in Chile. “It would definitely not bolster its own case for promoting a free and secure, stable and interoperable internet.”

And that signal will be heard loud and clear around the world:

Mishi Choudhary, a lawyer who founded the New Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Center, said the Indian government would also use a U.S. ban to justify further crackdowns. It has already engaged in internet shutdowns, she said, and it banned TikTok in 2020 over border conflicts with China.

“This gives them good reason to find confidence in their past actions, but also emboldens them to take similar future actions,” she said in an interview.

Mr. Lara of Derechos Digitales noted that countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua had already passed laws that gave the government more control over online content. He said increased government control of the internet was a “tempting idea” that “really risks materializing if such a thing is seen in places like the U.S.”

A forced sale or ban of TikTok could also make it harder for the American government to ask other countries to embrace an internet governed by international organizations, digital rights experts said.

And, if the goal here is to hurt China in particular, that may backfire massively:

Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that if the TikTok measure became law, the “hypocrisy would be inescapable and the dividends to China enormous.”

China has long made a big deal whenever the US government is hypocritical like this. This would be a huge PR win for the Chinese government. It would allow it to claim that its Great Firewall approach to the internet is right, and that the US was admitting that openness and an open internet fails. It would allow China to call out US hypocrisy, and that matters a lot at this moment when China is working hard to build stronger relationships with lots of countries around the globe.

Banning TikTok won’t help the US against China. It will play right into China’s hands. It doesn’t need TikTok to get data on Americans, nor to try to influence Americans. But, destroying decades of US foreign policy promoting an open and free internet serves China’s interests massively.

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TikTok is gearing up for a long legal battle to fight legislation in the US that threatens to ban the app in its largest market if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, refuses to sell the viral video platform.

The US House of Representatives on Saturday passed a package of national security bills that included legislation that would result in TikTok being banned in the country if Chinese parent company ByteDance does not divest the app.

Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s public policy head in the US, told staff in response that if the bill became law, the company would “move to the courts for a legal challenge.”

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Apparently, the TikTok ban bill is back.

Speaker Mike Johnson plans to include TikTok divestiture legislation already passed by the House in a fast-moving aid package for Ukraine and Israel that the chamber is set to clear on Saturday. The Senate is expected to quickly take up the measure, and President Joe Biden promised Wednesday to sign it immediately.

If signed into law, the bill would deliver a significant blow to a video-sharing app used by as many as 170 million Americans. Its enactment would also mark a major setback to the company’s intense lobbying efforts, especially by Chief Executive Officer Shou Chew, who made the rounds on Capitol Hill last month in a bid to get the Senate to squelch the legislation.

I’ve already explained why the TikTok ban is both unconstitutional and would not do anything to fix the “concerns” that people have raised about it. We’ve also discussed how those most vocally pushing for the TikTok ban appear to be financially conflicted.

But, even more important than all that, is that a TikTok ban would be a disaster for the open web. Yes, other countries have banned apps, but they tend to be authoritarian countries that have never liked and never supported an open web.

Banning an entire app in the US would be a massive attack on the very concept of an open web. And that’s really unfortunate, given that the US used to be the world’s most vocal supporter of the web being kept open and free.

The New York Times recently had a good article calling out what a disaster the ban would be for the open web.

Digital rights groups and others around the world have taken notice — and raised the question of how the moves against TikTok contradict the United States’ arguments in favor of an open internet.

A Russian opposition blogger, Aleksandr Gorbunov, posted on social media last month that Russia could use the move to shut down services like YouTube. And digital rights advocates globally are expressing fears of a ripple effect, with the United States providing cover for authoritarians who want to censor the internet.

In March, the Chinese government, which controls its country’s internet, said America had “one way of saying and doing things about the United States, and another way of saying and doing things about other countries,” citing the TikTok legislation.

Passing the TikTok ban would effectively be telling the world (1) it’s totally okay to ban apps you don’t like, and (2) the U.S. long-standing commitment to the open web was always fake and always bullshit, because the second a successful foreign app came along, we tossed out those principles.

“It would diminish the U.S.’s standing in promoting internet freedom,” said Juan Carlos Lara, the executive director of Derechos Digitales, a Latin American digital rights group based in Chile. “It would definitely not bolster its own case for promoting a free and secure, stable and interoperable internet.”

And that signal will be heard loud and clear around the world:

Mishi Choudhary, a lawyer who founded the New Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Center, said the Indian government would also use a U.S. ban to justify further crackdowns. It has already engaged in internet shutdowns, she said, and it banned TikTok in 2020 over border conflicts with China.

“This gives them good reason to find confidence in their past actions, but also emboldens them to take similar future actions,” she said in an interview.

Mr. Lara of Derechos Digitales noted that countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua had already passed laws that gave the government more control over online content. He said increased government control of the internet was a “tempting idea” that “really risks materializing if such a thing is seen in places like the U.S.”

A forced sale or ban of TikTok could also make it harder for the American government to ask other countries to embrace an internet governed by international organizations, digital rights experts said.

And, if the goal here is to hurt China in particular, that may backfire massively:

Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that if the TikTok measure became law, the “hypocrisy would be inescapable and the dividends to China enormous.”

China has long made a big deal whenever the US government is hypocritical like this. This would be a huge PR win for the Chinese government. It would allow it to claim that its Great Firewall approach to the internet is right, and that the US was admitting that openness and an open internet fails. It would allow China to call out US hypocrisy, and that matters a lot at this moment when China is working hard to build stronger relationships with lots of countries around the globe.

Banning TikTok won’t help the US against China. It will play right into China’s hands. It doesn’t need TikTok to get data on Americans, nor to try to influence Americans. But, destroying decades of US foreign policy promoting an open and free internet serves China’s interests massively.

Flooding Congress with phone calls can work wonders to stop bad bills at times. The SOPA blackout 12 years ago was one of the most effective advocacy campaigns in history. Coincidentally, I was at the Capitol that day, and wandering the halls between meetings, hearing phones ringing non-stop was amazing.

However, that process was carefully planned out over weeks, with sites pushing a very clear message of why internet users should call Congress and complain about the terrible copyright laws that were being pushed.

It appears that TikTok may have taken the wrong lesson from all that and assumed that simply flooding Congress with calls is an effective strategy. It can be, but you have to equip callers with a basic understanding of what it is that they’re calling for and why. And maybe it doesn’t make sense to do it on a bill built off the (mostly false) belief that your app is controlling the minds of gullible American voters.

On Thursday, TikTok put up a pop-up on all US users’ screens when they went to get their daily fill of random videos:

“Stop a TikTok shutdown!” it yells, claiming that “Congress is planning a total ban of TikTok. Speak up now — before your government strips 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.”

The bill in question is stupid. It’s a fear-mongering (bipartisan) bunch of grandstanding nonsense. It doesn’t technically “ban” TikTok, but would directly require ByteDance to divest its ownership in the company. If ByteDance does not do so, then it is a ban (despite the bill’s sponsors insisting it’s not). It does seem like a pretty clear bill of attainder, targeting a single company, TikTok, out of yet another fear-mongering moral panic that a successful internet company coming out of China must be evil.

As we’ve been saying for years now, if the fear is about the privacy of American users of the platform, Congress could pass a comprehensive privacy bill. They just choose not to do so. Instead, they play up a silly culture war, which will only lead to even more retribution for American apps outside the US. Indeed, expect to see other countries passing similar bills demanding that US companies divest from successful apps in their countries, as a result of this stupid bill.

And, on top of that, the bill is almost certainly a First Amendment violation, as has been found during previous attempts to effectively ban TikTok, none of which have gone well in court.

TikTok’s gambit apparently worked in terms of getting people to call. But it didn’t always effectively get the message out:

TikTok users flooded some congressional offices with dozens of calls. Results were mixed: Some staffers dismissed the callers as uninformed, or as pranksters, or as “teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app.”

And, look, when you have a bunch of overly anxious politicians who think that TikTok is like Chinese mind control over American brains (it’s not, but that’s what they seem to think), it’s not difficult to see how telling TikTok users to call Congress could drive those politicians to think this is even more evidence of why the bill is needed, especially when there is a flood of calls from unsophisticated constituents talking about how they “spend their whole day on the app.”

And that seems to have been the case.

House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said if anything, TikTok’s orchestrated calling campaign “only exposed the degree in which TikTok can manipulate and target a message.”

And thus it’s no surprise that the committee voted 50 to 0 to advance the bill:

Lawmakers on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which greenlit the bill Thursday afternoon after months of negotiations, said the intent was not to get rid of TikTok, but to prevent a Chinese company from having access to large troves of American data.  The committee voted 50-0 to advance the bill to the full House or Representatives.

Again, it’s a painfully stupid and reactionary bill, but this campaign seemed pretty mistargeted. There was a way in which TikTok could have more effectively leveraged its large user base to talk about the problems and risks of such a bill. But just sending them in to scream at Congress was perhaps not the best approach given the specific animus behind this bill.