White House endorses new Senate TikTok bill, urges Congress to pass it ‘quickly’
U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and other U.S. senators unveil legislation that would allow the Biden administration to “ban or prohibit” foreign technology products such as the Chinese-owned video app TikTok during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 7, 2023.
Bonnie Cash | Reuters
The White House threw its support behind a new bipartisan Senate bill on Tuesday that would give the Biden administration the power to ban TikTok in the U.S.
The legislation would empower the Commerce Department to review deals, software updates or data transfers by information and communications technology in which a foreign adversary has an interest. TikTok, which has become a viral sensation in the U.S. by allowing kids to create and share short videos, is owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance.
Under the new proposal, if the Commerce secretary determines that a transaction poses “undue or unacceptable risk” to U.S. national security, it can be referred to the president for action, up to and including forced divestment.
The bill was dubbed the RESTRICT Act, which stands for Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally unveiled the legislation on Capitol Hill alongside a bipartisan group of Senate co-sponsors. The White House issued a statement publicly endorsing the bill while Warner was briefing reporters.
“This bill presents a systematic framework for addressing technology-based threats to the security and safety of Americans,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement, adding that it would give the government new tools to mitigate national security risks in the tech sector.
Sullivan urged Congress “to act quickly to send the bill to the President’s desk.”
“Critically, it would strengthen our ability to address discrete risks posed by individual transactions, and systemic risks posed by certain classes of transactions involving countries of concern in sensitive technology sectors,” said Sullivan.
A TikTok spokeswoman did not respond Tuesday to CNBC’s request for comment.
Sullivan’s statement marks the first time a TikTok bill in Congress has received the explicit backing of the Biden administration, and it catapulted Warner’s bill to the top of a growing list of congressional proposals to ban TikTok.
As of Tuesday, Warner’s legislation did not yet have a companion version in the House. But Warner told CNBC he already had “lots of interest” from both Democrats and Republicans in the lower chamber.
Warner declined to say who he and Republican co-sponsor Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., might look to for support in the House, but added, “I’m very happy with the amount of interest we’ve gotten from some of our House colleagues.”
Earlier this month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill that, if it became law, would compel the president to impose sanctions on Chinese companies that could potentially expose Americans’ private data to a foreign adversary.
But unlike Warner’s bill, the House legislation, known as the DATA Act, has no Democratic co-sponsors, and it advanced out of committee along party lines, complicating its prospects in the Democratic-majority Senate.
Senators introducing the bill on Tuesday emphasized that unlike some other proposals, their legislation does not single out individual companies. Instead, it aims to create a new framework and a legal process for identifying and mitigating specific threats.
“The RESTRICT Act is more than about TikTok,” Warner told reporters “It will give us that comprehensive approach.”
Christina Wilkie | CNBC
The new Senate bill defines foreign adversaries as the governments of six countries: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. It also says it will apply to information and communication technology services with at least 1 million U.S.-based annual active users or that have sold at least 1 million units to U.S. customers in the past year.
That could reach far beyond TikTok, which in 2020 said it had 100 million monthly active users in the U.S.
The company has been under review by the Committee on Foreign Relations in the U.S. stemming from ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, which was a precursor to the popular video-sharing app.
But that process has stalled, leaving lawmakers and administration officials impatient to deal with what they see as a critical national security risk. TikTok has maintained that approval of a new risk mitigation strategy by CFIUS is the best path forward.
“The Biden Administration does not need additional authority from Congress to address national security concerns about TikTok: it can approve the deal negotiated with CFIUS over two years that it has spent the last six months reviewing,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said in a statement before the bill text was released.
“A U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide,” the company said. “We hope that Congress will explore solutions to their national security concerns that won’t have the effect of censoring the voices of millions of Americans.”
TikTok’s interim security officer Will Farrell described in a speech on Monday the layered approach the company plans to take to mitigate the risk that the Chinese government could interfere with its operations in the U.S.
The so-called Project Texas would involve Oracle hosting its data in the cloud with strict procedures over how that information can be accessed and even sending vetted code directly to the mobile app stores where users find the service.
Farrell said TikTok’s commitments would result in an “unprecedented amount of transparency” for such a technology company.
Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.
“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.
Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, at least for now.
Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.
That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful remains confident.
“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games
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