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When viral advocacy fails: TikTok told users to call Congress in campaign backfire

Flooding Congress with phone calls can work wonders to stop bad bills at times. The SOPA blackout 12 years ago was one of the most effective advocacy campaigns in history. Coincidentally, I was at …

And maybe it doesn’t make sense to do it on a bill built off the (mostly false) belief that your app is controlling the minds of gullible American voters. And, look, when you have a bunch of overly anxious politicians who think that TikTok is like Chinese mind control over American brains (it’s not, but that’s what they seem to think), it’s not difficult to see how telling TikTok users to call Congress could drive those politicians to think this is even more evidence of why the bill is needed, especially when there is a flood of calls from unsophisticated constituents talking about how they “spend their whole day on the app.” Lawmakers on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which greenlit the bill Thursday afternoon after months of negotiations, said the intent was not to get rid of TikTok, but to prevent a Chinese company from having access to large troves of American data.

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