I hope this doesn’t sound overly cynical or conspiratorial. My sense is that there’s panic about unfettered access to what’s happening in Gaza on TikTok, which is shaping Gen Z’s perceptions in a way that isn’t deemed acceptable by the political establishment. US-based companies seem to have processes in place - direct or indirect - to suppress the reach of such content.
This is overly conspiratorial, because the timeline doesn't line up. Gaza has only been in the news since October 7th 2023.
The government first started talking about banning TikTok in 2018 (under Trump). Ordered them to divest of US interests and prohibited transactions with them in 2020 (under Trump). The latter of which was overturned by the courts.
The current administration took over in 2021, and in 2021 labelled the PRC as a foreign adversary. Discussed the threat to the US through the PRCs control of software applications and teh vasts swaths of information available from their users, directed agencies to find risk mitigation measures, and started a long process of negotiating with TikTok over how exactly it continued to operate.
The act ordering divestment is the inevitable consequence of those talks failing... those talks failed sometime late 2022 or early 2023 (the last proposal under them was in August 2022).
The sudden resurgence of the years-dormant campaign to ban TikTok, and its rapid legislative success this time around, were directly because of Israel and Gaza. From the mouths of senators: "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok...if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I know that's of real interest..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)
Jacob Helberg, a member of a congressional research and advisory panel called the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has been working on building a bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks, united in part by their desire to ban TikTok. Over the past year, he says, he has met with more than 100 members of Congress, and brought up TikTok with all of them.
[...]
It was slow going until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok, Helberg said. People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic content posted to the app.
The push for the TikTok ban only went bipartisan after October 7. It was stalled out before that.
^^^^^^
Same reason they passed the nonprofit killing bill bipartisanly, for whatever reason this seems to be a huge deal for the people in government right now.