The House passed a bill on Wednesday that would ban the popular video app TikTok nationwide if its China-based owner refuses to sell.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted 352-65 to pass the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) released a joint statement praising the House and urging Senate action.
“We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok – a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party. We were encouraged by today’s strong bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives, and look forward to working together to get this bill passed through the Senate and signed into law,” said the senators.
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TikTok, owned by China-based parent company ByteDance, launched an aggressive lobbying campaign to defeat the legislation, claiming that it would violate the First Amendment rights of its 170 million US users and harm thousands of small businesses that rely on it.
President Joe Biden said last Friday that 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 reporter 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 an “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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