GOP Senator Defies Trump On TikTok, Warns Companies Could Face Billions in ‘Ruinous Liability’ for Helping to Restore App
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) emerged as a key figure Sunday to stand up to President-elect Donald Trump on the latter’s vow to “save” TikTok from being banned in the US after its Chinese-owned parent company declined to divest from the video-sharing app in time to comply with US law.
Under a bipartisan law signed last year by President Joe Biden, Beijing-based ByteDance was given until Sunday to sell TikTok or see it shuttered in the states. The company declined to offload the platform and TikTok voluntarily shut itself down Saturday night.
TikTok said Friday its third-party service providers were in the dark about finding themselves in hot water, so the app would cease to function after Saturday.
Hours after TikTok closed up shop, the company announced those providers had been given a green light by Trump and that TikTok was back up and running.
Trump said in numerous statements online that he would at the very least offer TikTok a 90-day extension while he sought a permanent solution.
The president-elect’s reasons for suddenly supporting the beleaguered foreign-owned app are unclear. He did express muted support for TikTok last month after apparently discovering he was popular on its servers.
In any event, Trump, Biden, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are all on the record expressing national security concerns about TikTok dating back years.
While his party’s leader has warmed to TikTok, Cotton emerged Sunday to oppose Trump on throwing a lifeline to a platform that has been categorized as spyware cloaked as harmless entertainment.
On his X page, Cotton shared TikTok’s Sunday announcement that it would reopen after Trump assuaged the concerns of its US tech partners.
The senator commented, “Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from DOJ, but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs. Think about it.”
If Cotton’s opposition to TikTok operating in the US was not clear, he shared a comment earlier Sunday that left little doubt about his feelings on the app. In a joint statement with Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE), the duo praised numerous American tech companies for removing TikTok from their app stores:
We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it. Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of “extension” of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China. Only then will Americans be protected from the grave threat posed to their privacy and security by a communist-controlled TikTok.
Trump might be attempting to shore up support with younger Americans or his sudden support for TikTok could be a vanity project.
No matter his motives for seeking to save TikTok, he has clear opposition from within his own party.
