The U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday passed laws forcing TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. to quickly divest its ownership stake to take effect, tying it to a key aid package for Ukraine and Israel .
An enormous lobbying effort led by TikTok chief Shou Chew did not overcome a bipartisan coalition concerned that the app was collecting data from greater than 170 million Americans — and that the Chinese government could potentially use it to spread propaganda.
The sweeping bill, which passed by a vote of 360-58, also imposes latest restrictions on the sale of knowledge to foreign adversaries by data brokers and allows the seizure of frozen Russian assets supporting Ukraine.
The Senate is anticipated to vote on the measure next week, and President Joe Biden has said he’ll sign the bill.
“This bill protects Americans, and especially America’s children, from the malign influence of Chinese propaganda on the app TikTok. “This app is a spy balloon in Americans’ phones,” said the bill’s writer, Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas.
Opponents of the bill equivalent to Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, could still attempt to kill the TikTok measure within the Senate, but such efforts are unlikely to succeed.
ByteDance intends to exhaust all legal challenges before considering any kind of divestiture if the TikTok ban goes into effect, in accordance with people accustomed to the matter.
The years-long investigation into TikTok’s connection to China spans presidential administrations, political parties and branches of presidency. Former President Donald Trump tried to ban the app through an executive order that was repealed under Biden, whose administration oversaw a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment within the United States.
Several bipartisan prohibition bills were proposed in Congress after which forgotten. The divestment-or-ban framework seems to have finally lost its hold.
The bill passed Saturday gives ByteDance nearly a yr to divest from the social media platform, with 90 of those days subject to a presidential waiver — longer than the six-month timeframe in a version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives earlier this yr adopted.
This prolonged deadline means TikTok doesn’t need to divest or shut down before the election — to the dismay of some lawmakers who fear China could use the app to interfere in U.S. politics.
TikTok rose to prominence in the course of the pandemic as a spot to share entertaining, short videos without the pretense of perfection found on apps like Instagram. Its algorithmically curated feed, tailored to people’s interests — reasonably than who they follow — was a brand new, engaging approach to scroll social media. This idea has since been copied by Meta and Alphabet’s YouTube.
TikTok has argued that the laws would violate the First Amendment, noting that the corporate is spending greater than $1.5 billion on privacy efforts to deal with national security concerns. TikTok has brought creators and small business owners to the US Capitol to argue that without TikTok they’d suffer economic losses.
They also encouraged users to call their lawmakers and urge them to vote against the bill. The company hired well-known lobbyists to influence lawmakers. So far none of this has been enough.
