7521 during the 118th United States Congress by representatives Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi,[c] following years of various attempts by federal lawmakers to ban TikTok in the country.

Critics of the act say a forced sale under the threat of a ban may be a violation of the First Amendment or motivated by political opinions regarding the Israel–Hamas war, and that a comprehensive privacy legislation would be more appropriate than singling out TikTok.

Trump signed the executive order on January 20 following his inauguration, delaying the enforcement of PAFACA for at least 75 days for his administration to have "an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward".

[26][18][27] Based on leaked materials, BuzzFeed News reported in June 2022 that ByteDance employees in China had repeatedly accessed American user data.

[33][34][35][36] In 2023 Forbes reported that the Taxpayer Identification Numbers including Social Security numbers of American content creators and businesses being paid by TikTok were stored in China and accessible by ByteDance employees there,[37] and a company software hosting internal TikTok information seen by Forbes had been inspected by Chinese cybersecurity agents ahead of the 20th National Congress of the CCP.

[40] TikTok and ByteDance have acknowledged that their policies in 2019 and 2020, no longer applicable globally, could be used to suppress topics politically sensitive in China and other countries but claimed that this was done to "[minimize] conflict on the platform".

[41][42] In November 2023, members of the U.S. Intelligence Community and an Australian Strategic Policy Institute researcher raised concerns that TikTok and other social media platforms can be used by the CCP and the PRC to shape political narrative.

[45][46][47] There is insufficient public evidence to show that American user data has been accessed by or shared with the PRC government,[48][49][33] with some claims reportedly exaggerated.

[57][58] In 2023, an apparent spike in pro-Palestine content appeared on TikTok following the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip in response to the Hamas-led attack on Israel.

[72] Before the divestiture deadline, the company that owns the designated application must provide users their data from the service at their request and in a machine readable format.

[74][75] Other bills in the 118th United States Congress had proposed removing exceptions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that allowed Executive Order 13942 to be successfully challenged in court, with some authorizing, in addendum to removing the IEEPA exceptions, for the executive branch to impose visa restrictions on the employees of companies that owned the designated applications, to require U.S. nationals employed by the companies to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or the specific power to prohibit transactions with companies that knowingly provide the user data of persons within U.S. jurisdiction to the PRC.

[78][76] The proposed RESTRICT Act would have explicitly authorized review for information and communications technology and services transactions separate from the Commerce Department's ICTS supply chain rule created under the IEEPA, and would have created a separate process similar to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review foreign adversary holdings in ICTS companies.

[87] Regarding the potential of a political backlash, then Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that House Republicans jammed the TikTok amendment into the $95 billion foreign aid package that could no longer wait and had to be "passed as quickly as possible".

Republican political strategists pointed to the large Democrat following on TikTok and said that Biden, who signed the bill, will likely take the brunt of any blame.

[89][90] Several civil liberties and digital rights advocacy organizations also lobbied against it, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Knight First Amendment Institute, Fight for the Future, the Center for Democracy & Technology, Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Asian American Federation, Access Now, the Chinese Progressive Association, FreedomWorks and PEN America.

Other industry and advocacy groups that reportedly lobbied for or against the bill included Oracle, Google, LinkedIn, Lenovo, Dell Technologies, the NCTA, the Competitive Carriers Association, and Issue One.

[101] Shortly after the House of Representatives vote, a spokesperson for China's Foreign Ministry said the bill was putting the U.S. on "the opposite side of the principle of fair competition and international economic and trade rules.

[102] Sources told The Wall Street Journal that the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party instructed the country's state media outlets to increase positive coverage of ByteDance, although Beijing's overall response appeared to be muted.

[105] Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute said Congress can address the problems associated with TikTok "without restricting Americans' access" to it by "passing a comprehensive privacy law".

Evan Greer of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future called for "strong privacy legislation to protect our data from all Big Tech companies" and governments.

[105] Justin Sherman, an adjunct professor at Duke University, said that TikTok's ownership by ByteDance "should prompt real national security questions" but "the US also needs comprehensive privacy and cybersecurity regulations for all companies."

Critics of the legislation have outlined that American platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been targeted by foreign influence operations, including by the Chinese government, in the recent past.

[105] A group of free speech and civil rights petitioners including the ACLU argued that the government "cannot accomplish indirectly what it is barred from doing directly".

On May 9, 2024, trade association NetChoice removed TikTok (which the firm had represented since 2019) as a member, after previously defending it in other efforts to ban or force divestiture of the platform.

Such claims spurred criticism from free speech and civil liberties advocates that the bill was intended as an implicit act of viewpoint discrimination prohibited by the First Amendment.

[126] ByteDance opted to shutter TikTok and remove it from app stores on January 18, 2025, though stated in a message to users that they expect this to be a temporary outage pending Trump taking office.

[133] Trump signed the executive order on January 20 following his inauguration, delaying the enforcement of PAFACA for at least 75 days for his administration and promising immunity for companies that provided services to TikTok during that time.