Tiktok Tries To Sway Dc With Ad Blitz

The embattled app TikTok, in the face of a looming survival deadline, has launched an old-school campaign to sway Washington, blanketing Metro stations with ads to remind policymakers of its importance to the economy, and circulating new research that argues it’s not a security threat to the U.S.

“TikTok took us from $10 to $25,000 in a week!” says one ad that has played at Union Station and the Capitol South stop, with a joyful photo of Arizona cafe owner Ruben Trujillo. Another shows a Georgia auto repair shop owner saying “80% of my business is from TikTok.”

The campaign comes as the White House is seriously entertaining a pitch by Oracle to keep the company alive in an acquisition deal.

As a PR strategy, it echoes a push by TikTok almost exactly a year ago, when the company tried unsuccessfully to mobilize its tens of millions of users to prevent a Congressional ban. Now, with the ban in effect and Congress’ role in the drama over, it’s far less clear who the new campaign’s target is.

The uncertainty highlights the strange predicament TikTok is in. Technically illegal since Jan. 19, it is effectively staying online at the pleasure of President Donald Trump, who announced that he wouldn’t enforce the ban until he’d had 75 days to work out a deal to sell the company in some way.

That clock runs out April 5.

The company declined to comment on questions about its intended strategy.

On Capitol Hill, China hawks interviewed by POLITICO appeared unmoved or said they hadn’t seen the campaign — and even if they did, it’s not clear how much they could change. Lawmakers have invited Oracle for meetings this week to discuss the possible deal and their security concerns, POLITICO reported on Sunday.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) told POLITICO recently that he has not heard of the campaign, and that after the 75-day order expires, “I want it [TikTok] to go away. It is absolutely a national security threat.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he had not seen the ads.

The Washington ads are just one tendril of a nationwide campaign TikTok filmed last spring and has mounted this year with TV commercials, a Super Bowl spot and billboards.

TikTok ran a full-page ad last month in POLITICO’s print newspaper, which circulates on Capitol Hill. It featured the same set of creators as the Metro ads and read “small businesses in America are thriving on TikTok.”

Washington lawyer Joel Thayer, a defender of the law, said the TikTok ads seem designed to sway Trump personally through his base.

“The president responds to political pressure and political pressure given by populations who like him,” Thayer said. “What I think they’re really trying to do is make a case to the American public and have the American public make their case to the president.”

To address a more concrete concern about the app — that China could compel Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to fork over sensitive information on 170 million Americans — TikTok also contracted with a data security firm to assess its existing efforts to shield U.S. data from Beijing’s access in late February. Since then, it has promoted the review’s finding of no “indication of internal or external malicious activity,” and “no sharing of protected U.S. user data with China.”

The study was meant to validate Project Texas, an alternative to a ban that TikTok proposed and partially set in motion to firewall American user data and store it on U.S.-based servers run by Oracle. A complete revival of the initiative would require government participation in implementing key aspects and resuming talks with an interagency panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

The White House is eyeing a similar licensing agreement with ByteDance and Oracle that would give the American cloud provider oversight over TikTok’s user data and collection in the U.S., Fox Business’ Charles Gasparino has reported.

So far no deal has been announced. But Vice President JD Vance, who Trump has tasked with brokering one, told NBC News Friday that before the April deadline, the administration will “almost certainly” reach a high-level agreement that “allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.”

The chief impasse is that ByteDance says dropping its ownership stake is not possible — technologically or commercially — while the law requires the app to eliminate any ties to China. Company leaders and investors continue to view a compromise based off Project Texas, instead of a full sale, as their best hope and Oracle as the only serious contender among interested bidders, according to The Information.

Critics of the TikTok law also said that the current ad campaign looks like an attempt to rewind the national debate and put it back on pre-2024 terms, before the law was signed and when TikTok was trying to prove that warehousing its data in the U.S. was sufficient protection against a security threat.

Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University technology law professor who has opposed the law, said the “ideal outcome” for TikTok would be Project Texas, which emerged from company negotiations after Trump tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok during his first term.

“What Tiktok is likely hoping for now is perhaps that the Trump administration takes another look at Project Texas,” he told POLITICO. “The other possibility, which is also really live here, is that there be some additional ownership adjustments, some changes to ownership that allow the president to have what we might say in the law as a colorable argument that there’s been a qualified divestiture.”

Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.