Tuesday the Senate passed a bill containing a version of the TikTok divestment plan. President Biden signed it Wednesday so, as of now, ByteDance has nine months to find a buyer or face a national ban.

In reality, things won't move so quickly. TikTok has already vowed to sue and the ACLU is in their corner. Just the legal part of this battle could take more than nine months and while that drags on the clock isn't ticking. Still, it's a dramatic turn for a company that counts roughly one out of every two people in the US as a user.

This morning Politico published an interesting account of how TikTok wound up in this position. Apparently it was a surprise. TikTok really believed that their congressional testimony last year had been a "tremendous success."

“They thought it was a tremendous success,” said Jim Lewis, a tech expert and former diplomat. When he spoke with TikTok general counsel Erich Andersen days after the hearing, Lewis was shocked to find him in high spirits. “[Andersen] told me they ‘batted it out of the park,’ or something like that,” he said...

“They pepper-sprayed Washington with money,” said Jacob Helberg, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, who helped pressure Congress to pass the ban. “But they really never took the time to actually answer, in a satisfying way, the question that people had — which was, ‘Are you controlled by the Chinese Communist Party?’”...

“They kind of felt — and this was in multiple conversations — that they were untouchable,” Lewis said.

As you may recall, TikTok launched a big marketing project called Project Texas which was designed to reassure everyone that data from US users would be safely hosted here in the United States. They opened a couple of Transparency Centers and invited "tech journalists" like Taylor Lorenz to experience a dog and pony show about how their system was completely secure. They also spent millions on lobbyists and put out a call for influencers to join their campaign.

But no on on Capitol Hill bought into Project Texas. It probably didn't help that there were numerous stories published over the past two years stating outright that Chinese engineers had access to US data. And then there was the balloon.

In February of 2023, a Chinese spy balloon began floating across the northern United States. The balloon had no direct connection to TikTok but the sense that China was using any and every means to spy on Americans really seemed to penetrate in a way that maybe it hadn't before. Suddenly it wasn't nearly as difficult to believe that China might use a silly video app for spying purposes as well.

Ahead of Chew’s March 2023 testimony in the House, just six weeks after the balloon was shot down, the company brought a small army of TikTok creators to Washington in an effort to pressure Congress to lay off the ultra-popular app. Rallying just outside of the Capitol, the creators — joined by a handful of TikTok-friendly lawmakers — blasted Congress for trying to take away their livelihoods.

Lewis called that rally a misstep, touting the app’s popularity instead of addressing Capitol Hill’s national security or influence concerns...

“The big tech companies do not go up and throw their weight around,” Lewis said. “They’re much more humble — and ‘humble’ is never a word I heard from TikTok.”

Still, TikTok had some success killing a version of the ban (the RESTRICT Act) which was introduced last year. Maybe that success would have lasted longer if not for another story that made a splash. In November of 2023, just weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel, Osama bin Laden started trending on TikTok. Lots of people came out of the woodwork to praise Bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”

“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read — it’s literally two pages — go read ‘A Letter to America,’” said TikTok user Lynette Adkins in a video posted to the platform on Tuesday, referring to the title often given to the text by bin Laden. “Come back here and let me know what you think. Because I feel like I’m going through like an existential crisis right now, and a lot of people are. So I just need someone else to be feeling this too.”

Commenters felt similarly awestruck by the document. “Just read it.. my eyes have been opened,” wrote one. “Read our entire existence for filth and he did NOT miss,” another said of bin Laden’s criticisms of the U.S. The clip itself went viral, with other young TikTokers also sharing the letter approvingly, encouraging followers to read it. “We’ve been lied to our entire lives, I remember watching people cheer when Osama was found and killed,” wrote a 25-year-old user who posted the letter in full. “I was a child, and it confused me. It still confuses me today. The world deserves better than what this country has done to them.”

If the spy balloon convinced people that China might use the app for spying on Americans, the Bin Laden trend probably convinced them that TikTok could have a strong but negative influence on Americans' views of hot-button issues. On top of that, a lot of people were understandably pissed off to see the man behind 9/11 getting a strange new respect on the app. TikTok did its best to clean up the mess but it was too late.

It also didn't help that researchers were able to produce evidence suggesting TikTok was already censoring some topics considered sensitive in China. There was pushback from TikTok and others to that study but instead of just disagreeing, TikTok pulled down the tool the researches had used to make their conclusions. It looked a bit like a cover up of unapproved information, something that happens a lot in China.

I'm not sure what the final straw was but it was probably the moment when TikTok began asking its users to call members of congress. Many of the people who called were confused about what was happening and some were calling their representatives and making threats. If anyone still needed proof that TikTok could be turned into a political weapon, this was it.

MORE ASSASSINATION THREATS CONFIRMED: A DIFFERENT H0USE OFFICE TELLS ME THEY HAVE HAD "NEARLY A DOZEN" DEATH THREATS ISSUED AGAINST THE MEMBER OF CONGRESS BY @TIKTOK_US USERS https://t.co/idNWwV7QpH

— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) March 7, 2024

The nail in the coffin came last week when we learned that the Chinese Embassy was lobbying against the bill. If the argument is that TikTok is distinct from China, having the embassy go to bat for you is the wrong way to convince lawmakers.

So, a long series of missteps on TikTok's part but the bottom line is that they never could convince anyone who was paying attention that the CCP wasn't ultimately in control. Maybe they'll be able to convince a judge, but I sincerely hope not.