Washington is coming after TikTok — so where are all the angry users?

When a bill that could ban TikTok raced through the House of Representatives six weeks ago, the company tried to sic its 170 million American users on Congress — pushing them to flood phones on Capitol Hill. That pressure effort largely backfired.

Congress responded with a fast-moving new bill that the Senate could send to President Joe Biden’s desk as soon as tonight.

This time, lawmakers in the House and Senate report receiving few calls from the platform’s users. And though the company sent some push notifications to users urging them to lobby their senators, it added a note: “Please be respectful.”

The relative silence from the app’s massive user base — a mostly young, often fiercely loyal audience — reflects more than a change of tactics on the part of the company. It’s also because the app itself makes it hard to catalyze action, or even conversation, around breaking news topics.

“All has been (fairly) quiet since the initial wave hit a few weeks back” said one Senate Republican staffer about the outreach its office received this week from TikTok users and creators.

On TikTok itself, it’s not clear how many users are actually following the news on the platform, or care about a potential ban, or are likely to protest its fate in time to make a difference.

Some news-style accounts did make posts explaining Congress’ approach ahead of the House vote last week, and upset users gathered in politicians’ comment threads. On Saturday, when the House passed the TikTok bill, President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign — which joined TikTok during the Super Bowl — posted videos on the app about a first-time voter and border security spending, and users lined up to dunk on him.

“TikTok is safe enough to use for campaigning but not for citizen’s use? SO interesting,” @SolGroveJewelry commented. “If you ban tiktok I won’t be voting for you,” another comment from @NOWELLYPOLY read.

The measure would force a sale of the app, or ban it in the U.S., a rapid move that caught the company off-guard and has many career TikTok creators worried for their futures.

On Tuesday a group of self-organized creators protested the upcoming Senate vote at the U.S. Capitol — a replay of a similar effort in March that had no apparent effect on the vote in Congress.

A spokesperson for Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a co-sponsor of the House bill, said “We received a lower number of messages of all kinds this round.”

As Washington takes on TikTok, the potential impact of the app’s user base has been looming over the debate as a potential political force.

Although more than one-third of young Americans regularly get their news from TikTok, per Pew Research polling, the app is not well-equipped for delivering live updates on a political development. Many users browse TikTok by letting its algorithm serve up a highly personal, non-chronological stream of content, rather than regularly checking their followed accounts for recent activity.

“It’s very difficult to know what actually is going on across the platform,” said Casey Fiesler, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches online communities.

Occasionally, there are hot topics that go viral across personalized feeds, but by several accounts, the latest TikTok bill was not one of them.

“I saw much more a month ago,” said Fiesler, referring to the March vote in the House on an earlier version of the bill. “I do think for anything that plays out like this, with this kind of pace, there’s just a sort of fatigue.”

There’s also a blurry line between serious news and conspiracy theory. Some of the TikTok news currently on the app is less focused on the facts of the potential ban than on dark implications about what Congress is really up to. Several popular creators have posted that Congress is trying to suppress information ahead of an election. Another theme is that the bill is written to help favored American tech CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg.

When it comes to assessing what people see or care about on TikTok, the app poses another challenge: In January, TikTok restricted a tool for tracking popular hashtags on its site, after lawmakers and groups used data from it to question whether the company was suppressing topics sensitive to the Chinese government, including ones related to U.S. politics, the war in Gaza, and Tiananmen Square.

The tool now only displays view and post counts for the top 100 hashtags by industry. Even under the categories for news and tech, until Tuesday, there was no trace of popular hashtags that users have used on videos about the legislation, such as #tiktokban, #savetiktok, and #creatorsfightback. (On Tuesday, #tiktokban appeared as no. 11.)

Without a clear central conversation among users on the app, TikTok’s creators — people who rely on income from their posts — have become the face of the fight against a ban.

In recent days, some took to media interviews to plead that nearly their whole incomes were built around TikTok, and they would suffer great losses if it were banned. TikTok has self-reported that it supports more than 7 million American businesses and drove $14.7 billion in revenue for small business owners last year.

But most of the app’s massive base are not major creators. Almost half of adults lurk on TikTok without ever having posted a video themselves, and part of the challenge in activating those users is the nature of the app.

Stuart Perelmuter, CEO of political influencer marketing firm atAdvocacy, said users may also have needed time to digest yet another update in what has been a dragged-out legislative process.

“People are used to Congress moving pretty slowly, especially compared to TikTok,” Perelmuter, who opposes the legislation, said. “The very, very fast media landscape is such that people are quieter about it.”