When some American users opened TikTok on Thursday morning, they were met with a full-screen message encouraging them to call Congress and say no to a TikTok ban.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpeak up now \u2014 before your government strips 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression,\u201d the screen says. \u201cLet Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.\u201d<\/p>\n
Below the message, users can click a red \u201ccall now\u201d button.<\/p>\n
![\"TikTok](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/tiktok-shutdown.jpg?w=333\")
<\/p>\nImage Credits:<\/strong> TikTok screenshot obtained by TechCrunch<\/p>\n<\/div>\n TikTok has been under scrutiny in the United States for a while. Last year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress for five hours, addressing lawmakers\u2019 concerns about Chinese authorities accessing American data (TikTok, an American company, is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company). Chew has repeatedly stated that TikTok and ByteDance are not conduits for the Chinese government. There is no evidence that the Chinese government has accessed Americans\u2019 TikTok user data, but in a separate incident, ByteDance employees were fired for gaining access to the IP addresses<\/a> of journalists to track their location<\/a>.<\/p>\n TikTok is banned on government-issued phones in dozens of states, and this week, the app\u2019s struggles in the U.S. government have escalated. This week, a bill<\/a> was introduced that would give the president the ability to identify social media apps as threats to national security, which would remove them from app stores. The bill\u2019s sponsors are urging TikTok to sever its ties with ByteDance to avoid this fate, or else it could lose its 170 million American users.<\/p>\n TikTok confirmed to TechCrunch that this message appeared for users 18+ in the United States, but based on our own testing, not all users in that demographic received the pop-up.<\/span><\/p>\n The platform has previously tapped its community to support its battles in Congress. When Chew made his first appearance in Congress last year, TikTok invited a group of creators, including Vitus Spehar (UnderTheDeskNews<\/a>), to go to D.C. to lobby on the app\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n \u201cCongress made clear that they don\u2019t understand TikTok, they don\u2019t listen to their constituents who are in the community of TikTokers \u2014 and are using this TikTok hysteria as a way to pass legislation that gives them superpowers to ban any app they deem \u2018unsafe\u2019 in the future,\u201d Spehar told TechCrunch at the time.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n