The USA Senate voted by a wide margin late in favour 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.
Driven by widespread worries among USA lawmakers that China could access Americans’ data or surveil them with the app, the bill was passed by the House of Representatives recently and USA President Joe Biden said he will sign it into law.
“For years we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist party to control one of the most popular apps in America that was dangerously shortsighted,” said Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. “A new law is going to require its Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good move for America.”
Asked about the Senate’s vote, the Chinese foreign ministry referred to the comments the ministry made in March when the House of Representatives passed a similar bill. At the time, the ministry criticised the legislation, arguing “though the USA has never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to its national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok.”
The four-year-battle over TikTok, which is used by 170 million people in the United States, is just one front in a war over the internet and technology between Washington and Beijing. Last week, Apple said Beijing had ordered it to remove Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China over Chinese national security concerns.
TikTok is set to challenge the bill on First Amendment grounds and TikTok users are also expected to again take legal action. A USA judge in Montana in November blocked a state ban on TikTok, citing free speech grounds.
The American Civil Liberties Union said banning or requiring divestiture of TikTok would “set an alarming global precedent for excessive government control over social media platforms. …If the United States now bans a foreign-owned platform, that will invite copycat measures by other countries.”
TikTok, which says it has not shared and would not share USA user data with the Chinese government, did not immediately comment but has told employees it would quickly go to court to try to block the legislation. “This is the beginning, not the end of this long process,” TikTok told its staff.
