Washington: The US Senate voted by a wide margin on Tuesday to pass legislation that would ban the short-video game in the country if its landlord, the Chinese technology company ByteDance, fails to sell it in the next nine months to a year, raising concerns among US lawmakers that China could obtain Americans ‘ data or use TikTok to do so. The act was signed into law on Wednesday by President Joe Biden.
” For centuries we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist party to handle one of the most popular programs in America… that was extremely foolish”, said Senator Marco Rubio, the leading Republican on Intelligence Committee.
Vowing that TikTok may fight the law in US authorities, its CEO Shou Zi Chew told the phone’s 170million people in US,” Make no mistake, this is a ban on you and your words”.
The four-year conflict over TikTok is just one side of Washington and Beijing’s ongoing battle over technology and the internet. Apple reported last week that Beijing had ordered it to remove Meta’s WhatsApp and Threads from its Chinese app store due to concerns about Chinese national security.
TikTok claims to fight US ban legislation in court.
The Chinese foreign ministry responded on Wednesday to questions the Chinese government had raised about the Senate’s vote when the House of Representatives passed a similar bill in March. At the time, it criticised the legislation, arguing” 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”.
Users of TikTok are also expected to once more file legal claims against the bill, and the company is scheduled to contest the bill on First Amendment grounds. In November, a US judge in Montana imposed a state ban on TikTok on the grounds of free speech. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, prohibiting or requiring the divestment of TikTok would” set a worrying global precedent for excessive govt control over social media platforms.”
TikTok has told employees it would quickly go to court in an effort to stop the legislation. It claims it has not shared and would not share US user data with the Chinese government. ” This is the beginning, not the end of this long process”, it told staff Saturday in an email seen by Reuters.
The Senate voted 79 to 18 in favour of the bill. After being introduced just weeks ago, the TikTok divestment directive received quick approval.
If ByteDance failed to divest TikTok, app stores owned by Apple, Google, and others could not legally offer TikTok or offer web hosting to TikTok-controlled apps or TikTok’s website. Additionally, the bill would give the White House new tools to compel the sale of additional foreign-owned apps that it consider to be security threats.
It might also be a problem in the November presidential election. One day before his term is scheduled to end, Biden’s signing sets a Jan. 19 deadline for a sale, but he may choose to extend the deadline by three months if he believes ByteDance is progressing. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, said on Monday that Biden was “pushing” for a ban on TikTok and would be held accountable if one was implemented. He urged people to take notice. Biden’s re- election campaign plans to continue using TikTok, a campaign official said Wednesday. Trump’s campaign has not joined TikTok.
In his attempt to block TikTok in 2020, the courts ruled that then-Prez Trump had been denied by the courts. However, according to experts, the new law is likely to strengthen the Biden administration’s legal standing to ban TikTok if ByteDance does n’t divest the app.
