TikTok’s last dance? The lobbying showdown over the app’s future in the U.S. continues
This article originally appeared in OpenSecrets. Sign up for their weekly newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
After an expensive lobbying blitz, Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed into law a sweeping foreign aid package that includes a provision barring TikTok from operating in the U.S. if the video-sharing app’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell its stake in the platform within a year.
ByteDance’s federal lobbying spending reached nearly $2.7 million in the first quarter of 2024, the most it has ever spent during the first three months of any year. It is also more than the video-sharing app spent on lobbying any prior quarter, with the exception of the third quarter of 2023. The jump follows a year of record lobbying totaling over $8.7 million in 2023 amid increased scrutiny of the video-sharing platform’s ties to China.
Since kicking off its influence operations in 2019, ByteDance has spent more than $23.9 million on federal lobbying, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.
The largest sum ByteDance spent during the first quarter of any prior year was nearly $1.6 million last year, when the platform went on to set a new record for lobbying spending.
While TikTok maintains dual headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles, it has faced increased scrutiny for being wholly owned by Beijing-based ByteDance due to national security concerns. After the bill’s passage by the Senate on Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray reiterated those concerns during an interview with NBC News, warning that “TikTok’s parent company is beholden to the Chinese government.”
For years, U.S. officials have expressed concerns about TikTok amid speculation that Chinese government actors may have access to the personal data of its more than 170 million U.S. users. TikTok has refuted allegations of spying on Americans.
After BuzzFeed News reported that ByteDance employees repeatedly accessed private data about American TikTok users, the company sought to distance itself from China by working with Austin-based software giant Oracle to stop storing American user data in China.
The Justice Department and FBI launched a criminal investigation into allegations of ByteDance surveilling American journalists in 2023, which is reportedly ongoing.
As allegations against TikTok mount, policymakers have struggled with weighing the potential national security risks posed by the app against the constitutional issues and backlash a ban could raise.
By including the TikTok provision in a bill to provide $95.3 billion in foreign aid amid escalating conflicts in Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine, congressional proponents were able to move the legislation further than previous proposals.
But the fight is far from over with TikTok already planning a legal challenge to the law on First Amendment grounds, and the infrastructure advocating for the video-sharing app’s interests in the U.S. goes far beyond K Street lobbyists — from megadonors to online influencers.
Trump’s TikTok flip-flop
The final iteration of the bill gives TikTok nine months to divest before facing the ban. An earlier version of the legislation passed by the House in March gave TikTok six months, which would have forced ByteDance to divest TikTok or stop U.S. operations before Election Day.
Since that divestiture deadline falls in 2025 and is extendable to a year by the president, the longer time frame also means whoever is elected in November will have the ability to decide whether to give TikTok more time.
Former President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Monday accusing Biden, his opponent in the 2024 presidential election, of being “responsible for banning TikTok.”
The post also accused Biden of wanting to shut TikTok down to “help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party,” though he provided no evidence to support that statement. Trump has a history of making disproven claims about the social media platform.
Trump’s position on TikTok has evolved since his presidency, when he issued an executive order prohibiting all transactions with TikTok’s parent company for national security reasons. The former president also stated that a ban on TikTok would mean further success for Meta and Facebook, a company he clashed with repeatedly during and after his presidency.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and one of TikTok’s top competitors, also set a new record in the first quarter of 2024 with federal lobbying spending totaling $7.6 million.
Federal lobbying disclosures don’t specify whether Meta lobbied directly on legislation to crack down on TikTok but the Silicon Valley-based social media behemoth has a history of quietly countering the video-sharing app. In 2022, a Washington Post investigation revealed that Meta had paid GOP consulting firm Targeted Victory as part of a campaign to promote disproven stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook by placing op-eds in major news outlets and enlisting political reporters as well as local politicians to help.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump posted on Truth Social in 2020.
Trump’s reversal on TikTok comes weeks after GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, a major TikTok investor, reportedly met with the former president at Mar-a-Lago.
Yass’ global quantitative trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, was one of ByteDance’s first major backers. The firm currently owns roughly 15% of ByteDance, a stake worth about $40 billion. Yass’ personal share is 7% of that, worth about $21 billion — accounting for a significant chunk of Yass’s net worth, according to the Financial Times.
In April, sealed court documents inadvertently released by a Pennsylvania court revealed that Susquehanna International Group played an even bigger role in the company than previously known.
While the megadonor supported other candidates over Trump in the Republican presidential primary, the New York Times reported that Yass is now investing in Trump’s Truth Social platform and is expected to make “a large donation to a group supporting the former president’s political campaign.”
Days after Trump’s public condemnation of legislation to effectively ban TikTok, the former president called Yass “fantastic” at a retreat for donors to conservative advocacy group Club for Growth, of which Yass is a major funder.
Club for Growth, a major player in contested Republican primaries, has advocated against legislation to clamp down on TikTok and reportedly warned that it will give Republicans who vote against TikTok’s interests in Congress a worse score on its annual scorecard. Yass has contributed $16 million to Club for Growth’s super PAC during the 2024 cycle through the end of March – accounting for nearly half of the super PAC’s total contributions, OpenSecrets’ analysis found.
The Club for Growth super PAC’s most recent monthly campaign finance report, filed April 20, indicates Yass accounted for $4.5 million of the $7.8 million it received. Other conservative and libertarian groups benefiting from Yass’ largesse have advocated against cracking down on TikTok as well, CNBC reported.
But Yass is not the only one who stands to lose if TikTok is banned in the U.S.
Chinese Embassy officials met with congressional aids to lobby against the bill, according to Politico, spurring outrage from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who widely construed the meetings as confirmation of TikTok’s importance to China.
While the meetings reportedly included discussions about legislation to force a sale or ban of TikTok, a spokesperson for the embassy told Politico the activities were “not about lobbying for a single company, but about whether all Chinese companies can be treated fairly.”
The Chinese Embassy has no foreign agents currently registered to lobby under the Foreign Agents Registration Act but any activities that diplomats and consular officials engage in as a part of their official functions are not legally required to be disclosed under FARA’s diplomatic exemption.
Oracle, a multinational software company currently headquartered in Austin, Texas that is housing TikTok’s U.S. data, also sent its top lobbyists to meet with Senate aids regarding the bill, CNBC first reported. During the first quarter of 2024, Oracle’s lobbying reached $2.4 million, a decrease from every quarter during the past year. Federal lobbying filings do not divulge whether Oracle lobbied for or against the bill, though the company stands to lose one of its largest customers should the ban take effect.
Ads fuel TikTok fight
The showdown over TikTok’s fate has also played out in advertising.
Starting in March, TikTok leveraged its own platform to send push notifications urging users to call their representatives to “stop a TikTok shutdown.” TikTok’s attempt to activate its users spurred a flood of angry calls to Congress.
But lawmakers expressed frustration with the overwhelming influx of calls from angry constituents and voiced concerns about TikTok’s power over its users, leading the effort to backfire, similar to how both sides of the aisle widely viewed the Chinese Embassy’s lobbying as confirmation of TikTok’s value to China.
TikTok has spent millions more on television and digital ads pushing back on legislation that could ban its U.S. operations. AdImpact has tracked $4.5 million in advertising spending by TikTok fighting the legislation this year alone, with $2.5 million of that since March.
That month, TikTok bought millions of dollars in airtime in Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all battleground states represented by vulnerable Democrats. The ads do not explicitly advocate for or against candidates, instead highlighting the possible consequences of banning TikTok in the U.S.
“Think about the five million small business owners that rely on TikTok to provide for their families,” a purported TikTok user says in the ad.
Some groups have also spent on advertising and lobbying to support the legislation to crack down on TikTok.
State Armor Action launched what they describe as a “multimillion-dollar ad campaign” urging a crackdown on TikTok in March and reported spending another $50,000 on lobbying related to “foreign adversary-controlled applications.”
The nonprofit, which does not disclose its donors online and did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication, was created in September 2023 and also operates as the “TikTok Coalition.”
Its “TikTok is the CCP” campaign has spread in online advertising and on television, spurring a cease and desist letter from TikTok, according to Federal Communications Commission filings reviewed by OpenSecrets.
An initial letter dated March 22 details what TikTok’s lawyers describe as “false claims intended to harm TikTok,” taking issue with the description of TikTok as “Chinese owned” and statements describing Zhang Fuping, the vice president and editor-in-chief of ByteDance’s Chinese operation, as an “editor of TikTok,” and a “top Chinese Communist” who “controls what 170 million Americans think.”
FCC records indicate that State Armor Action’s ads were slated to run through at least April 29.
In a follow-up letter dated March 28, TikTok’s lawyer indicates that the initial ads were removed and replaced by updated ads with slightly adjusted language clarifying that Zhang is the “editor of TikTok’s parent company.”
The letter emphasizes that Zhang is not employed by TikTok or ByteDance, which is a privately-held global holding company. Instead, the letter details that Zhang is employed by an “indirect subsidiary of ByteDance” that is part of the “Douyin Group (HK) Ltd.,” which is registered in Hong Kong, emphasizing that Zhang “supports businesses that operate only within China.”
Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok, which is only accessible outside of the country. Both video-sharing apps operate under the umbrella of ByteDance.
According to TikTok lawyers’ letter in FCC records, TikTok Inc. is incorporated in California and wholly owned by TikTok LLC, a Delaware limited liability company that is wholly owned by TikTok Ltd., a Cayman Islands company, and the ultimate parent company is ByteDance Inc.
TikTok and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment prior to publication.
