On March 13, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by an overwhelming 352 to 65 margin. If legislated, it would ban the hugely popular TikTok social media app in the U.S., where it has 150 million users — unless its owner, the Chinese tech company ByteDance, sells off TikTok within six months to a buyer not “controlled” by a “foreign adversary.” The U.S. Senate could take up the TikTok bill soon, and President Joe Biden has said he’ll sign it into law.

While U.S. geopolitical and economic competition with China is the underlying driver of the ongoing attacks on TikTok, another factor has emerged: its role in spreading news about the plight of Palestinians amid Israel’s monthslong assault on Gaza that has killed over 33,000 people and wounded over 76,000. Key backers of the TikTok ban have, with little evidence, openly criticized the app for being “anti-Israel.”

Truthout spoke to several tech experts and Palestinian organizers about the TikTok bill. They stressed that social media platforms have offered Palestinians the ability to document and share their stories with mass audiences across the world. For younger people in particular who sympathize with Palestinians, apps like TikTok have been ways to gather news and spread information. All this comes even as social media platforms — TikTok included — have been accused of flagging and repressing pro-Palestinian content.

“For so long, a Palestinian narrative has been censored in the mainstream media,” says Sandra Tamari, a Palestinian organizer and the executive director of Adalah Justice Project, a Palestinian-led advocacy organization based in the U.S. Now, amid horrific violence, “it’s Palestinians in Gaza narrating their story.”

The effort to ban TikTok in the U.S. is not new. Former President Donald Trump, amid years of anti-Chinese racist baiting, issued an executive order in August 2020 to ban “any transaction by any person” in the U.S. with TikTok owner ByteDance. The order invoked the “spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China” as a “national emergency.” Ultimately, a federal judge blocked Trump’s TikTok ban in December 2020.

Paris Marx, author and host of the popular “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast, told Truthout that U.S. efforts for global dominance over China in the tech sector are driving the attacks on TikTok as well as other measures, including blocking Huawei telecom technologies and restricting Chinese access to U.S. chip technology.

All this amounts to “a broader approach by the U.S. government to try to restrict the Chinese tech sector” and “reduce its access to international markets and ability to compete with U.S. tech companies,” says Marx. The TikTok ban, says Marx, is part of a broader effort to protect U.S. corporations against “Chinese competitors that, in some cases, are matching or even out-innovating some........

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