The US Senate voted by a wide margin late Tuesday in favor of hlegislation that would ban TikTok in the United Statesif its owner, the Chinese technology company ByteDance, fails to sell and abandon the popular app for short videos within 1 year, reports “Reuters”.
Driven by widespread concerns among American lawmakers that China can access and monitor Americans’ data through the appthe bill was passed by the US House of Representatives on Saturday and US President Joe Biden said he would sign it into law on Wednesday.
“For years, we allowed the Chinese Communist Party to control one of America’s most popular apps, which was dangerously short-sighted,” said Senator Marco Rubio.The new law would require its Chinese owner to sell the app. It’s a good move for America.”
Asked about the Senate vote, the Chinese Foreign Ministry referred Wednesday to comments made by the ministry in Marchwhen the House of Representatives passed a similar bill.
At the time, the ministry criticized the legislation, arguing that “although the US has never found any evidence that TikTok poses a threat for US national security, they never stopped going after TikTok.”
The US state of Montana becomes the first to ban TikTok completely
A bill was passed
The four-year battle for TikTok, which is used by 170 million people in the United States, is just one front in the war for technological and Internet supremacy 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 because China’s national security concerns.
The American Civil Liberties Union said that banning or requiring the sale of TikTok would “set an alarming global precedent for excessive state control of social media platforms. If the United States now bans a platform owned by foreign nationals, it will lead to similar measures by other countries.”
TikTok, which says it has not and will not share US user data with the Chinese government, did not immediately comment but told officials it would quickly go to court to try to block the legislation.
“This is the beginning, not the end, of this long process,” TikTok warned its staff on Saturday in an email seen by Reuters.
The Senate voted 79-18 in favor of the bill, which was tied to a measure to provide $95 billion in mostly military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The TikTok sales directive won swift approval after it was introduced just weeks ago.
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