Some American users opened TikTok on Thursday morning and saw a full-screen message telling them to call Congress and say no to a ban on TikTok.
“Speak up now—before your government takes away the right to free speech of 170 million Americans,” the screen says. “Tell Congress what TikTok means to you, and tell them not to vote for it.”
There is a red “call now” button below the message that people can click. 
In the US, TikTok has been getting a lot of attention for a while now. Last year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew spoke to Congress for five hours about lawmakers’ worries about Chinese officials getting access to American data. ByteDance, a Chinese company that owns TikTok, is an American business. Chew has said over and over that TikTok and ByteDance are not part of the Chinese government. There is no proof that the Chinese government has gotten into American TikTok users’ data, but workers at ByteDance were fired for getting into the IP addresses of journalists to find out where they were.
Dozens of states do not allow TikTok to be used on government-issued phones. There were already problems with the app in the U.S. government, but this week a bill was presented that would let the president remove social media apps from app shops if they were seen as threats to national security. The people who sponsored the bill want TikTok to cut ties with ByteDance so that this doesn’t happen. If it doesn’t, TikTok could lose its 170 million American users.
TikTok told Eltrys that this message showed up for users in the US who were 18 or older, but our tests showed that not all of those users got the pop-up.
The site has asked its users to help it fight in Congress in the past. Last year, when Chew went to Congress for the first time, TikTok asked a group of artists, including Vitus Spehar (UnderTheDeskNews), to go to Washington, D.C., and speak out for the app.
Spehar told Eltrys at the time, “Congress made it clear that they don’t understand TikTok and don’t listen to their constituents who are TikTokers. They are using this TikTok hysteria as a way to pass legislation that gives them the power to ban any app they deem “unsafe” in the future.”
