The US Senate has officially passed the foreign aid package that also contained a bill that could ban the social media app, TikTok, in the US. It is the final nail in the coffin of its parent company, ByteDance: divest, sell its ownership of the platform to a US entity, or get the banhammer.
The voting of the TikTok bill was passed faster than the previous bill, primarily because it was part of a foreign aid package that would help Ukraine and Israel, and provide humanitarian aid to Gaza. The bill will now head over to President Biden’s desk, where he is more or less committed to signing the aid bill.
“Congress is not acting to punish ByteDance, TikTok or any other individual company,” Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote. “Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, harming vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our U.S. government personnel.”
The “anti-TikTok” bill was passed primarily due to fear that the ByteDance-owned social network was collecting the data of its US customers and feeding them back to the government of its home country, China. In correlation, US lawmakers fear that the Chinese government could influence the type of messages it wants US users to see.
ByteDance has denied these accusations, stating that it doesn’t store US information in China, and that TikTok itself is based in Singapore. For that matter, TikTok isn’t even allowed in China, to the extent that its parent company has a separate yet similar version on the app in the country, called Douyin.
In light of this, ByteDance will likely be challenging this bill in the US.
(Source: White House, The Verge, Bloomberg)
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