“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary isn’t worried about a new bill that would ban social media app TikTok in the United States.
The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” which calls for TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell to an American company or risk being banned, unanimously passed through the House Energy and Commerce Committee with bipartisan support.
The 12-page bill seeks to “protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications,” and will give ByteDance six months to divest if signed into law.
During O’Leary’s Friday appearance on Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” guest host Gillian Turner noted that small businesses depend on the app for marketing.
If Kevin O'leary buys TikTok, I feel like it's going to become some kind of insane marketing platform
You're gonna suddenly have finance guys shilling crypto scams on TikTok https://t.co/T5fAwSVUmn pic.twitter.com/jPEYsGtjdE
— Justin (@KramericaIntern) March 8, 2024
“If it’s banned eventually, what does that mean for the small business economy?” She questioned.
“It not going to get banned. I’m going to buy it. Somebody will buy it,” O’Leary asserted. “It won’t be Meta and Google. A regulator will stop that. A syndicate will be formed.”
“I’d like to be involved obviously,” he added. “What I would do is form a bipartisan committee, an advisory committee for 18 months. Go to them and say to them, how much will you let me keep of the Chinese?”
O’Leary believes that the app’s best course of action would be to get an American CEO, move their servers to the United States, and shut down the “Chinese back doors” by rewriting the code.
“That’s what everybody wants,” he pointed out. “Leave a taste for the Chinese and put a mandate in place. They can keep 20%. That way you run a process, this is worth billions.”
The “Shark Tank” star noted that TikTok is amongst the “most successful advertising platforms” on social media.
“All of my companies use it. I’ll buy it. I can put a syndicate together as long as I can get the blessing of the House,” he insisted.
“Nobody wants to fund this thing if they think it will buck politically,” O’Leary concluded. “If we make it all American including servers, I can get this deal done. I want to buy it.”
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle fear TikTok for its ability to collect data on their millions of users and and misuse it for espionage purposes at the behest of the Chinese government.
“America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher, who sponsored the bill.
“TikTok’s time in the United States is over unless it ends its relationship with CCP-controlled ByteDance.”
There is also concern that the social media app could be repurposed to circulate Chinese misinformation and propaganda.
A fear that lawmakers say TikTok proved on Thursday morning, when ByteDance responded to the bill by going directly to users.
The app send a push notifications that urged users to “Take action: Speak up against a TikTok shutdown.”
The notification included a link that prompted them put in their zip code, which generated another link to the individual phone numbers of their local congressional member.
Lawmakers have since been spammed with calls to their offices by people who use TikTok, and most of the calls have been from minors.
House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party member Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), said the action proves why the legislation is needed.
“Most of these push notifications went to minor children, and these minor children were flooding our offices with phone calls,” Krishnamoorthi commented to CBS News.
“Basically they pick up the phone, call the office and say, ‘What is a congressman? What is Congress?’ They had no idea what was going on.”
“This is exactly the reason why so many of our colleagues voted for the bill,” Krishnamoorthi added.
“They don’t want a foreign adversary controlling social media apps using geolocation to target minor children to call members of Congress or interfere in our elections. This is exactly the reason why this particular legislation is necessary now.”