SAN FRANCISCO – As the US Congress voted on April 23 on legislation that could ban TikTok, Americans were posting their real-time reactions on the embattled video-sharing app.

The Senate passed a revised TikTok Bill, tied to a package to provide aid for Israel and Ukraine, with a 79-18 vote, and US President Joe Biden signed it into law on April 24. It will force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an American entity within 12 months or face a ban in the United States. The House passed the Bill on April 20 with a 360-58 vote.

Here’s what lawmakers who oppose the law, content creators and users said.

Lawmakers

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California, who represents Silicon Valley, had been a vocal opponent of the Bill. He shared his opposition through videos posted on TikTok before and after the House vote. Mr Khanna has been outspoken against a sweeping ban on TikTok, and he has met people who create content for TikTok to understand their concerns.

“I voted no today on the Bill to ban TikTok because it hurts the free speech of creators, activists, organisers, and small business owners who rely on the app to have their voices heard,” Mr Khanna said in a statement following the House’s vote. He added his support for a new law that would give users more control of their data.

Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York was another opponent of the Bill and previously said that banning TikTok meant silencing the voices of young people. In a 2½-minute video on April 20, he called for comprehensive social media reform instead of singling out TikTok.

“The House is showing a complete disconnect between what we are doing in the House of Representatives and what’s happening in the real world with young people,” Mr Bowman said in the video.

Users

Ms Rebekah Ciolli, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three in Indiana, signed up for a TikTok account early in 2023.

Before that, she had hoped for a ban because, she said, she did not “need another social media app that is consuming your life”. But now, she spends a few hours on the app every day, looking up content like at-home learning and family-friendly recipes, and finding like-minded users. To her, losing TikTok would mean losing a community.

“There’s all these moms across the world that I’m friends with, even though I’ve never truly met them in person,” Ms Ciolli said in an interview. “I will definitely be sad to lose that.”

Content creators

Ariana Afshar, also known as @arianajasmine___ on TikTok, usually creates content about political news. After the House passed the TikTok legislation, she filmed herself in front of a screenshot of CNN’s coverage of the Bill to explain the vote, adding that “this is only going to hurt the trust that people have with the government”.

Because most of her audience is Gen Z and young millennials, Afshar worried that passing such a Bill would dissuade young people from voting in 2024’s election. “The younger generation is already pretty mad at this administration,” she said in an interview. “The ripple effect is going to be much larger than what lawmakers are calculating right now.”

To many content creators, TikTok is a lifeline. They built their businesses on TikTok, and the app is how their customers got to know them. The uncertainty surrounding TikTok is making many of them worry about their livelihood.

“It’s affecting everything, even down to our financial planning,” said Nadya Okamoto, who is a founder of August, which sells sustainable menstrual products, and is known for her content on menstrual health. “We have been able to grow organically. And what’s scary is that as small-business owners, we don’t know what that looks like moving forward.”

Okamoto spearheaded an open letter to Mr Biden to oppose the passing of the Bill. The letter, last updated on April 22, had 47 signatures from TikTok creators.

V Spehar, who runs the news aggregation and analysis account @UnderTheDeskNews on TikTok, posted 10 videos over the past week about the legislation. On April 19, Spehar told more than three million followers about the upcoming vote, calling it a way the government misuses “the levers of power that they hold to pass a legislation that is deeply unpopular with the American public”.

“The consequence is not that TikTok gets banned,” Spehar said in an interview. “It’s that the American public loses faith even more in the institute of the government than they already have.” NYTIMES