ISTANBUL

Former US Congressman Mike Gallagher said the bill to ban the popular video-sharing app TikTok was dead until the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Israel, which brought the legislation back to life.

Senator Mark Warner and former Wisconsin Representative Gallagher discussed the TikTok ban at the Munich Security Conference.

Warner and Gallagher first introduced the bill, which claimed that TikTok was a national security threat to the US.

"I want to see if you're going to tell the real story," Warner said to Gallagher.

Gallagher said: "So we had a bipartisan consensus. We had the executive branch, but the bill was still dead until Oct. 7th. And people started to see a bunch of anti-Semitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again."

In March 2024, the US House of Representatives approved a bill requiring TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, to sell its US operations to a company with no connections to the Chinese government or face a ban on the TikTok app nationwide.

After taking office on Jan. 20 this year, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to delay the enforcement of the law by 75 days.

"And then there was a huge miscalculation by TikTok when it became apparent that we were going to pass it out of committee. They forced sort of a pop up on the app that allowed people to call their members of Congress, and kids were calling into their members of Congress during school hours threatening to commit suicide if TikTok went away," Gallagher said.

"And for those of us who were concerned about the use of this platform for propaganda purposes or brainwashing, it sort of proved the point in the moment," he added.