The Chinese-owned social media app TikTok has seen a marked reversal of fortunes after nearly being banned in the United States by President Donald Trump just three years ago. Despite avoiding a federal ban, state-level regulatory threats spurred TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to launch a major lobbying and public relations effort targeting federal and state lawmakers, along with the American public at-large.
ByteDance’s efforts have had an impact. According to the Pew Research Center, public support for banning TikTok sits at 38-percent, a fall from the 50-percent supporting a ban in March. Fueling the shift in public opinion was a carefully crafted marketing campaign thought to cost billions of dollars. While ByteDance, a privately-owned Chinese tech conglomerate, doesn’t publicly publish its corporate finances, a leaked 2022 financial statement indicates it spent $19.2 billion on marketing world-wide – about 31-percent of its total revenue.
TikTok on Capitol Hill.
Efforts by ByteDance to head off threats its TikTok app weren’t just limited to marketing and public relations. Lobbying disclosure reports for 2023 reveal the Chinese tech conglomerate spent $7.4 million on efforts to influence Congress and federal regulators. The company reported spending $5.3 million on federal lobbying in 2022.
Bolstering its presence on Capitol Hill, ByteDance expanded its government affairs staff – adding four former Members of Congress and 31 former Congressional staffers. Lobbyists for ByteDance include former Sens. Trent Lott (R-MS) and John Breaux Sr. (D-LA) as well as Michael Bloom, former policy advisor to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Freddy Barnes who served as an advisor to Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
TikTok in the GOP
Outside ByteDance’s direct spending on lobbying, TikTok has also benefited from influence efforts orchestrated by some of its U.S. investors. Most of billionaire Jeff Yass’s fortune was made off of TikTok – with around $21 billion of his $28 billion net worth invested in the app. With so much skin in the game, preventing a ban on TikTok has been a top political concern of Yass’s.
The neoliberal Club for Growth, a center-right group which has received $61 million from Yass since 2010, has served as the primary vehicle for the TikTok billionaire’s government influence operation on Capitol Hill. Two of the Club for Growth’s biggest allies in Congress, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), have been outspoken critics of efforts to ban TikTok. Both lawmakers have also received contributions from Yass.
In presidential politics, both the Club for Growth and its primary donor, Jeff Yass, were early backers of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s Republican presidential nomination bid. Meanwhile, Douglas Leone – whose Sequoia Capital is another major investor TikTok investor – has contributed at least $2 million to the pro-DeSantis SuperPAC Never Back Down.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has joined TikTok in an effort to reach more voters. The decision by Ramaswamy drew fire from fellow primary candidate Nikki Haley – despite her own daughter having an active account on the social media app.
TikTok’s Future in America.
The meteoric turnaround in public opinion, along with the millions-of-dollars spent influencing U.S. lawmakers, makes any Congressional action to ban or restrict TikTok unlikely in the near term. While a federal court ruled against former President Trump’s attempt to ban the app through executive order, President Joe Biden could still pursue several avenues of executive action against TikTok. But even renewed executive action looks increasingly remote.
President Biden’s re-election campaign may soon be active on the Chinese social media app, with the hopes of shoring up support among young voters. And despite national security concerns, Vice-President Kamala Harris has admitted many members of her family are on the TikTok and have ignored her requests to delete the app.
In March, Biden’s Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo offered a bleak but blunt assessment of the biggest obstacle any attempt to ban TikTok faces: “The politician in me thinks you’re gonna literally lose every voter under 35, forever.”
