President Joe Biden said Friday he would sign off on new legislation in Congress that could potentially result in the ban of TikTok if lawmakers put it on his desk.
“Do you still support banning TikTok. Will you sign that bill?” a reported asked Biden Friday.
“If they pass it, I’ll sign it,” said Biden.
The “Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” which would give ByteDance roughly five months to sell TikTok, was advanced by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
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TikTok’s users, including children, are encouraged to contact congressional officials to voice their opposition to the bill, which they view as a “outright ban.”
“This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users,” Republican chair of the House of Representatives’ select China committee Mike Gallagher said. “America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States.”
Lawmakers argue that TikTok’s Chinese ownership could allow the Chinese government to access and exploit user data. These concerns have led to calls for more stringent regulations or even a ban on the platform.
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If the bill passes, ByteDance will have 165 days to either divest the app or app stores run by Apple, Google, and other companies to be prohibited from offering the TikTok app for download or from hosting apps that ByteDance controls.
However, the bill does not authorize any enforcement action against individual users of an affected app.
“This bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it,” a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.
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