Decoding the Legislation That Could End TikTok's Reign

As conservative ladies of Washington , we are an organization of like-minded ladies and gentlemen who are working to encourage , empower and equip citizens to stand up , speak up and take real action to create change in your local community , your state or even on a federal level .

You can learn more about the work that we do and how you can get involved by visiting our website at conservativeladiesofamericacom . I will also have all of that linked in the notes for you as well . Well , let's get into this whole TikTok ban bill .

The bill number on this is HR 7521 , and I will have a link to that bill text for you if you like to geek out on that sort of thing in the show notes . But you probably have heard of it as the TikTok ban and I was watching . I was scrolling through some reels on Facebook a couple of days ago and I don't have TikTok downloaded on any of my devices .

I don't even use the website . I never have . I just from day one . I just didn't want that downloaded on my devices . And , yes , I realized that Facebook , instagram , x and all of these apps are tracking us and gathering our data and all of that . But I just decided against TikTok , so I don't even have it .

So I'm scrolling through Facebook reels watching some influencers , and I heard multiple people say that after Wednesday , tiktok might go away . So make sure that you're following me on , you know , whatever other platform .

And so I had this realization of how many citizens , how many ordinary citizens just going about our daily lives , do not have an understanding of how our government process works and the simple understanding of how a bill becomes a law . So just really quickly , let's go over the status of HR 7521 , aka the TikTok ban .

So this bill had a vote yesterday , wednesday March 13 , in the House of Representatives in Congress . So this is a federal level bill . It will affect the entire country and it was passed .

It's a bipartisan bill , very strong bipartisan support on both sides , and it was passed with the exception of just 65 representatives voting no on this bill , and only 15 of them were Republicans , and I'm going to link the roll call .

If you're curious how your representative voted in the notes below so you can go look that up my representative , greg Stubey , here in Sarasota . He voted no , as did Matt Gates , who is also from Florida , as well as Marjorie Taylor Green from Georgia .

I know we had one other from Florida I forget who it was off the top of my head but there were three Congress people from Florida that voted against this , but by and large it was , you know , democrats against it .

It was 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans , and so it's kind of weird that my conservative congressman is voting in the same way that some of the radical left Democrats from my former home state of Washington , like Pramila Jayapal and Rick Larson , both voted no . So it's kind of weird to have them on the same side .

But what really caught my attention about this bill prior to the vote was a Twitter post by Congressman Thomas Massey from Kentucky , and he posted some screenshots of the bill , which is typically what a lot of people miss . They don't actually get into the text of the bill and so they miss a lot of the details .

I'm going to read you a portion of the text of the bill . So , foreign adversary controlled application . The term foreign adversary . Controlled application means a website , desktop application , mobile application or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated directly or indirectly , including through a parent company or subsidiary or affiliate .

So it's not , we're not just talking about the TikTok app , we're talking about websites , desktop applications . So this you know , if you are actually reading the text of the bill , it's pretty broad . So rep Massey calls this TikTok ban atrocious horse .

It will give the president the power to ban websites , not just apps , which is very concerning and very problematic . And it doesn't have to be just offshore , it doesn't have to be just foreign , and you'll hear in this clip that Tucker just released with Senator Rand Paul TikTok is not exactly owned by the Chinese Communist Party .

180 million Americans put dance videos up and whatever else is on TikTok and they choose the terms of the service the same way people on Facebook do . And does Facebook scrape your data ? Sure , does Google scrape your data ? Do all of these soft , these giant tech companies , scrape your data ? They all take your data .

But the thing is is there are now accusations they say , oh , tiktok's owned by the Chinese government . The Chinese Communist own it . Well , that's not even true . You can't say stuff just over and over again . That's not true . Tiktok is owned by about 60% of its own , by international investors from all over the world .

20% is owned by the two Chinese software engineers that created the app and 20% is owned by the employees of TikTok , which 7,000 of them are Americans . So there's a significant nexus of Americans in the ownership , and then there's a significant nexus of Americans using this and they say , oh , the Chinese government owns it . It's just frankly not true .

Now the company that owns TikTok also owns something like TikTok . That is censored and the Chinese let that be broadcast throughout China . The Chinese government does have a member of the board . It's called Doyin . It's the Chinese TikTok , but they don't have a member of the board of ByteDance .

They don't control ByteDance and the data is now kept in Oracle Cloud centered in Texas , and this has been done because the company wants to try to exist . It's a very popular app . It has a great deal of value , so they're doing anything they can to comply and yet the hysterics in the house are just shut them down , shut them down .

Communism , this communism , that . Look , I've written two books about Chinese communism and what it does , both during the COVID leak and also what it did during Mao's reign . So I am no fan of Chinese communism .

But at the same time , we can't sort of , like you know , emulate the Chinese to try to protect our way of life , becoming like the Chinese in banning things . Tiktok is banned in China . They don't have TikTok . They have a censored version in China that the Chinese government does control , but they don't control TikTok over here .

If we ban TikTok , we're simply becoming and acting like the Chinese .

Not that it changes my perspective on it or that I would download it , but it's interesting when you look at the makeup of the company and then take all that into account with this so called ban , I think this is a very dangerous policy that's so broad and will allow the president , whoever is in power , to have really this unilateral power to force the sale or

banning of an app or a website that they don't like . So that is extremely concerning . My representative , greg Stubbe , went on I forget what show it was , but he went on last night to discuss his thoughts about that .

Yes , and they just talked about the fact that they did it about Elon Musk . They did it about Trump and Russia collusion so who's to say that this president , joe Biden , isn't going to say that truth social is influenced by somebody in Russia or the Chinese Communist Party ?

And now , this new power that's been given to President Biden , he's going to shut down and divest truth social from being able to communicate to their base eight months before an election . I mean , the timing of all this is also very suspect . I mean , I agree with you .

You've probably heard lies that this bill is a Trojan horse or that it doesn't solve every problem on planet Earth . The truth is , this bill just says that TikTok can't be owned by our enemies . I voted hell yes . The current owner of TikTok , bite Dance , is a Chinese company . They're bound by Chinese surveillance law to give American data to the CCP .

So , as we already heard from Senator Rand Paul , we heard a different story . So which one is it ? Is it that TikTok is owned by a number of different people , including , sounds like 7,000 Americans have an investment into TikTok ?

So I find this really discouraging because , well , I tend not to believe Dan Crenshaw over Rand Paul , thomas Massey and Greg Stubbe , but I do find it's part of a bigger issue of we , the people , we the American citizens . We don't really know who we can trust . We don't know who is telling the truth . We don't know who is funding these different policies .

There was some information that I saw today on X sorry , I keep calling it X and Twitter and interchangeably , so you guys know what I mean .

But I heard some information , or read some information earlier today , that there's some conservative billionaire that's behind this and he's been donating to all the people that voted no , and that really doesn't make sense to me , because you only had 15 Republicans that voted no .

So it was an easy pass , with it being bipartisan , and it looks like it will be an easy pass out of the Senate as well .

So , kind of circling back to how I started with this as how a bill becomes a law , and a lot of people thinking that after this bill was voted on and passed out of the house , all of a sudden TikTok's going to be banned and all of these influencers will lose their followers and their content . That's not how bills become law .

So for the people that don't really understand and I'm not throwing any shade , because three years ago I probably wouldn't have remembered my high school civics lessons either and so where the bill goes next , now that it has passed out of the house , it will go over to the Senate , it will go through committees and then eventually it will get a full floor vote

in the Senate , which I would assume that it will get passed out of the Senate and then it will go to Joe Biden to be signed into law . There are a number of actions that citizens can take if they support or oppose this bill .

You can reach out to your senators I'm not sure what committee it will go to next , but you could reach out to the senators that are on that committee . What the best thing to do is reach out by phone or via email to your senator and Ask them to vote the way that you want .

I personally oppose this bill because I see that it could be a big infringement upon our First Amendment rights . I personally believe that we need to take responsibility for the information that we are downloading on our phone , the applications that we're using . We have to take personal responsibility for that and , especially with our children .

Your children shouldn't be downloading apps that you don't want them to download , and parents need to have a spine about that and say you know what ? We're not doing any social media or we're only doing , you know , instagram or whatever it is .

I think you know they're probably all bad for kids , but how do you put the toothpaste back in the bottle at this point . But I think that we are free people that are free to make our decisions and to me I see this as big government telling us what we can and can't do and overseeing what we should and shouldn't be having on our having access to .

So I disagree with it from that standpoint and I also tend to find Thomas Massey , rand Paul and Greg Stubbe , as well as some of these others , matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor-Green . I find them to be pretty credible . I guess I would believe them over some of these other people .

And you know , it's just , it's just discouraging because you just don't know who to believe . You know all of these people have special interests and money and you know behind them and driving their decisions . So it's really frustrating from from that aspect .

But I think we just have to do as much information gathering as possible and then make our best informed decision from that information that we have

. So I'm gonna have links to all of these posts on X , all of these videos , so that you can watch them in full . I'll have all of those linked up in the notes for you if you want to go dig through them yourself . But the moral of the story is TikTok is not being banned , at least not right now .

And it would , they would have to when this law passes . They'll have to abide by certain conditions to keep the app up . It wouldn't just like TikTok won't just go away , so everybody can rest easy that's concerned about losing their TikTok account . So anyway , thanks for letting me geek out on this bill with you . I hope you learned a little something today .

If you have thoughts on this particular bill , I would love to hear from you . All of the contact information for me is also linked in the show notes and I look forward to chatting with you again next time .