In the hours preceding a committee vote on a bill that could effectively ban Americans from accessing TikTok, users of the video-sharing app flooded congressional phone lines with angry calls. The protest, however, failed to stop the House Energy and Commerce Committee from advancing the bill on Thursday in a 50-0 vote, teeing it up for a full House vote next week.

The pressure campaign was in part sparked by a TikTok notification warning of a “total ban” and urging users to let their representatives “know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.” With at least 150 million active users in the US, TikTok’s attempt to rally its consumer base led to some House offices receiving hundreds of calls—and as many as 20 in a single minute, according to The Washington Post. It was “so bad we turned phones off,” a Democratic aide told Axios, “which means we could miss calls from constituents who actually need urgent help with something.”

Mike Gallagher, a Republican congressman and cosponsor of the bill, has called the app’s claims of an “outright ban” “an outright lie,” citing the deluge of calls as proof of China’s supposed use of technology to influence American voters: “Here you have an example of an adversary-controlled application lying to the American people and interfering with the legislative process in Congress.”

The measure—so named the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”—would not necessarily lead to a wholesale ban on TikTok. Rather, it would require the app’s owner, ByteDance, to divest from TikTok within 180 days of the bill’s passage and pave the way for an ultimatum: allow a company not “controlled by a foreign adversary” to take over TikTok’s US operations or forfeit its spot in the US application marketplace.

Despite the House committee’s unanimous vote, the GOP is not in complete lockstep on the issue. Donald Trump, for one, has come out in support of the app. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” he wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in last election, doing better,” Trump added, without providing evidence for said misdoings. Republican Dan Crenshaw, meanwhile, has argued in favor of the app’s total prohibition. “No one is trying to disguise anything,” the Texas congressman wrote in a recent post on X. “We want to ban TikTok.”

While ByteDance is registered in the Cayman Islands and purports to be majority-owned by international investment firms, lawmakers from both parties claim its ownership of TikTok poses a national security risk, believing that China could use intelligence and counter-espionage laws to compel TikTok to provide the Chinese government with Americans’ user data. The White House reportedly agrees with this assessment, and has signaled that Joe Biden would sign the bill into law. The Biden administration previously has expressed support for a separate, more controversial Senate bill—the “Restrict Act”—that would grant the federal government the ability to crackdown on foreign-owned apps. (Though certainly bad for business and accessibility, such bans are relatively easy to circumnavigate, as shown by the continued use of Instagram in Russia despite the app being “banned” by the country’s government nearly two years ago.) 

TikTok, for its part, has proposed alternative solutions during its yearslong negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The company’s proposals include a reform initiative meant to address Washington’s data protection and national security concerns, but the committee has yet to sign off on the plan.