"I will kill you if you f**king shut down TikTok,” a teenage boy warned to a member of Congress in a voicemail reviewed by The Spectator. “I will really really f**k you up. So don’t shut down TikTok. Bye bye!”
This week, Capitol Hill was inundated with a series of unusual callers — children, some as young as six years old. They had been enlisted by TikTok to forcibly push back against a bill that’s on track to sail through the House next week which forces the divestiture of a series of companies owned by foreign adversaries, like China in the case of the globally popular video app. TikTok is regularly accused of everything from feeding eating disorder content to girls to spying on journalists to extensively tracking user data — at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party, no less.
The aforementioned assassination threat was far from an isolated incident. That office received around a dozen; at least one other House office confirmed that they too received a threat to murder the member. “It turns out threatening to kill members is not an effective or persuasive tool,” a staffer for one of the offices noted. “In fact, it really seemed to backfire here.”
Beyond the assassination threats, offices of both parties were flooded with tens of thousands of calls, directed in part by TikTok itself, when it urged users to “stop a TikTok shutdown.” Countless kids took time out of their school days to tell their representatives that they will kill themselves if the government bans TikTok.
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