Lawmakers’ offices have reportedly been flooded with calls from TikTok users speaking out against a bill that would force the platform’s parent company to divest from the app or face a US ban.
The bill, which is backed by more than a dozen representatives, passed unanimously out of the House energy and commerce committee on Thursday with a vote of 50 to 0. TikTok responded by pushing out a notification to many of its estimated 170 million US users, calling on them to contact Congress in protest. The notification included a mechanism that allows people to search for their representative’s number by inputting their zip code.
This outreach led to a deluge of calls from TikTok users, congressional staffers told the Washington Post - as many as 20 calls per minute, leading some offices to temporarily shut down their phone lines. Taylor Hulsey, a communications director for Florida congressman Vern Buchanan posted on Twitter/X that staffers were “getting a lot of calls from high schoolers asking what a Congressman is”.