(March 18): Investors of TikTok’s Chinese parent company stand to benefit if it sells the app, because divestment would remove a source of uncertainty, a Republican lawmaker said.

“It would be in the financial interest of ByteDance’s investors to effectuate a forced sale,” representative Mike Gallagher, who spearheaded a House-passed bill aimed at making the company divest TikTok to allow its continued operation in the US, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.

Efforts to remove Chinese corporate influence over the popular social-media platform is back on the political agenda in an election year. At least two US senators voiced support in principle for the bill on Sunday, though it faces a slower process in the chamber after winning bipartisan backing in the House last week on concern over Chinese government influence on the American public.

Key senators have expressed constitutional reservations about banning the platform. Gallagher, who chairs a House committee looking into the US-China strategic competition, argued on Face the Nation that a forced sale “absolutely could” happen before the November elections.

“I think the user experience on the app would improve, and you wouldn’t have this concern over being propagandised, the opaque algorithm influencing the information you see,” he said. “That would go away, so I imagine it would actually increase in value.”