The House passed legislation on Saturday that could ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd, doesn’t divest its ownership within the year. This doesn’t mean the app is going anywhere anytime soon.
This is following the approval of a different bill in March that gave TikTok about six months to sell. According to this, should they fail, the app would be banned from U.S. app stores and internet services that support it.
The House Republicans' decision to include TikTok in a larger foreign aid package has been a priority to President Biden with widespread congressional support for Ukraine and Israel. This fast-tracked the earlier version of the ban to a six-month deadline, that stalled in the Senate.
The bill passed in March was passed by a bipartisan vote because both Democrats and Republicans had national security concerns with ByteDance Ltd. The recent modification that was announced on Saturday passed with a 360-58 vote and will now head to the Senate. This is after negotiations ensued about lengthening the timeline to give the company nine months to sell, with the possibility of 90 extra days should Biden deem significant progress was made in the sale.
TikTok is not pleased with the legislation, lobbying aggressively against it through the app's (mostly young) 170 million U.S. users to call Congress. However, the pushback didn’t seem to help the app’s case, only angering the lawmakers in Washington, where a major concern remains about Chinese threats to the U.S. Plus, few lawmakers happen to use the platform themselves.
“We will not stop fighting and advocating for you,” TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said in a TikTok video aimed at the app's users, AP News reported. “We will continue to do all we can, including exercising our legal rights, to protect this amazing platform that we have built with you.”
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