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 lawmakers took action because they feared the company’s current ownership structure threatened national security.
After passing by a vote of 352-65, the bill now moves on to the Senate, where its future is uncertain.
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.
Lawmakers find themselves grappling with the challenge of addressing national security concerns while preserving the principles of free speech and online expression.
To strike a balance, the bill focuses on divestiture rather than granting the executive branch authority to regulate content or target specific companies.
TikTok has consistently denied allegations that it poses a national security threat or that it shares user data with the Chinese government.
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The company emphasizes its commitment to protecting user privacy and has stated that it has never shared U.S. user data with Chinese authorities.
TikTok’s popularity among millions of users, particularly younger demographics, has generated support for the platform, with concerns raised about the potential impact of a ban on entrepreneurs and small businesses.
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