Republican senator says he was threatened over potential TikTok ban

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he received a voicemail this week in which someone threatened to “find” and “shoot” him over a potential TikTok ban.

“This is a voicemail my office received last night,” Tillis wrote Wednesday in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “TikTok’s misinformation campaign is pushing people to call their members of Congress, and callers like this who communicate threats against elected officials could be committing a federal crime. 

“The Communist-Chinese aligned company is proving just how dangerous their current ownership is,” Tillis continued. “Great work, TikTok.” 

Tillis’s post included audio of the alleged voicemail, in which a voice can be heard saying, “If you ban TikTok, I will find you and shoot you.”

“That’s people’s job, and that’s my only entertainment,” the voice in the audio continues. “And, people make money off there too, you know. I’m trying to get rich like that. Anyways, I’ll shoot you, find you, and cut you into pieces.”

The House passed a bill last week that could ban the popular social media platform if its China-based parent company, ByteDance, does not divest from it in five months. TikTok has urged its users via a notification to call Congress and “stop a TikTok shutdown,” saying the legislative branch is “planning a total ban of TikTok.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Wednesday that he is attempting to declassify information about risks from the app shared to senators in a briefing. The declassification push is a part of his larger backing of the bill that passed the House last week.

“We just had a very powerful briefing,” Warner said Wednesday following the briefing. 

“I’d like to get as much of the content declassified as possible,” he added. “But I think there was a reason why, when this brief was given on the House side, to the Energy and Commerce Committee, afterwards they voted 50 to nothing to move the legislation forward.”