This afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban TikTok in the U.S. if its owner, ByteDance, doesn’t sell the popular social media app.
TikTok has been wanted to be banned since the Trump administration, but the problem has been brought up again in the last few months. A bill very much like this was passed by the House in March, but the Senate didn’t seem very interested in taking it up. The president can give ByteDance an extra 90 days to sell TikTok, and the new form of the bill gives them nine months to do so instead of six months like the old bill did.
It sounds like the change has made some Senate doubters happy. On Thursday, Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), who is chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters that she had suggested the extension because it “makes it more likely that divestiture will happen.”
The new bill was passed with strong support from most Republicans and Democrats, with a vote of 360 to 58. It’s part of a bigger plan that includes aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It was probably added to help House Speaker Mike Johnson get more conservative support.
This coming week, the Senate might vote on the package. President Joe Biden has said he will back the bill and sign it. TikTok is likely to fight the bill in court if that happens.
The Chinese government uses the app to get information about American users and to spread propaganda to those users. Biden’s administration has been telling lawmakers about what it sees as the national security risks that the app poses. House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), on the other hand, called the app “a spy balloon in Americans’ phones” that is used to “surveil and exploit America’s personal information.”
This week, it became clear that a bill to ban TikTok was back on the table. The company responded by posting a statement saying that the House is “using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian aid to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, destroy 7 million businesses, and shut down a platform.”
Also Read: Lowa is Suing Tiktok Again, This Time Saying That They Lied About the Content That Kids Can See
Some civil liberties groups, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, have also fought against moves to ban the app in the past.
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