US Senate passes TikTok divestment-or-ban bill, Biden set to make it law
The US Senate voted by a wide margin late Tuesday in favor of legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States if its owner, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, fails to divest the popular short video app over the next nine months to a year.
The bill, fueled by widespread concerns among US lawmakers regarding potential access by China to Americans’ data or surveillance through the app, was approved by the US House of Representatives on Saturday. President Joe Biden has indicated his intention to sign the bill into law on Wednesday.
“Senator Marco Rubio, the leading Republican on the Intelligence Committee, remarked, ‘For years, we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist Party to control one of the most popular apps in America, which was dangerously shortsighted. A new law will now require its Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good move for America.'”
“In response to the Senate’s vote, the Chinese foreign ministry referred on Wednesday to comments previously made by the ministry in March when the House of Representatives passed a similar bill.”
At the time, the ministry criticized the legislation, arguing that “though the US has never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to the US’s national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok.”
The four-year-long conflict surrounding TikTok, which boasts a user base of 170 million people in the United States alone, represents just one aspect of the broader confrontation between Washington and Beijing concerning the internet and technology. In a recent development, Apple disclosed that Beijing had instructed it to remove Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China due to Chinese national security concerns.
TikTok intends to contest the bill on First Amendment grounds, and TikTok users are expected to pursue legal action once again. Previously, a US judge in Montana blocked a state ban on TikTok in November, citing reasons related to free speech.
The American Civil Liberties Union voiced concerns, stating that banning or mandating divestiture of TikTok would establish a troubling global precedent for excessive government control over social media platforms. They emphasized that if the United States were to ban a foreign-owned platform, it could prompt similar measures from other countries.
