WASHINGTON - US President Joe Biden on April 24 signed a Bill that would ban TikTok in the United States if its owner, Chinese tech firm ByteDance, fails to divest the popular short-video app over the next nine months to a year.
The social media platform, which is particularly popular with left-leaning young Americans, said it would challenge the move in court.
“Rest assured – we aren’t going anywhere,” TikTok chief executive Chew Shou Zi said in a video posted moments after Mr Biden signed the Bill into law.
“The facts and the Constitution are on our side and we expect to prevail again.”
On April 23, the US Senate voted by a wide margin in favour of the TikTok divestment-or-ban Bill, driven by widespread worries among US lawmakers that China could access Americans’ data or surveil them with the app.
The Bill was earlier passed by the US House of Representatives on April 20.
“For years, we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist Party to control one of the most popular apps in America. That was dangerously short-sighted,” said Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee.
Asked about the Senate’s vote, the Chinese Foreign Ministry referred on April 24 to comments the ministry made in March when the House of Representatives passed a similar Bill.
At the time, the ministry criticised the legislation, arguing that “though the US has never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to the US’ national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok”.
The four-year battle over TikTok, which is used by 170 million people in the US, is just one front in a war over the internet and technology between Washington and Beijing.
Last week, Apple said Beijing had ordered it to remove Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China over Chinese national security concerns.
TikTok is set to challenge the Bill on First Amendment grounds, and TikTok users are also expected to again take legal action. A US judge in Montana in November 2023 blocked a state ban on TikTok, citing free speech grounds.
The American Civil Liberties Union said banning or requiring divestiture of TikTok would “set an alarming global precedent for excessive government control over social media platforms... If the US now bans a foreign-owned platform, that will invite copycat measures by other countries”.
TikTok, which says it has not shared and would not share US user data with the Chinese government, did not immediately comment, but has told employees it would quickly go to court to try to block the legislation.
“This is the beginning, not the end of this long process,” TikTok told staff on April 20, in an e-mail seen by Reuters.
The Senate voted 79 to 18 in favour of the Bill, which was attached to a measure to provide US$95 billion (S$129 billion) in mostly military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
The TikTok divestment directive won fast-track approval after being introduced just weeks ago.
In 2020, then President Donald Trump was blocked by the courts in his bid to ban TikTok and Chinese-owned WeChat, a unit of Tencent, in the US.
However, the new legislation is likely to give the Biden administration a stronger legal footing to ban TikTok if ByteDance fails to divest the app, experts say.
If ByteDance fails to divest TikTok, app stores operated by Apple, Alphabet’s Google and others cannot legally offer TikTok or provide web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications or TikTok’s website.
The Bill would also give the White House new tools to ban or force the sale of other foreign-owned apps it deems to be security threats.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said he was concerned the Bill “provides broad authority that could be abused by a future administration to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights”.
Now that the Bill has been signed into law, ByteDance will have 270 days to divest TikTok’s US operations, with a possible three-month extension if there are signs a deal is progressing.
Democratic Senator Ed Markey said it would be hard, if not impossible, for ByteDance to divest by early 2025, adding that a sale would be one of the most complicated and expensive transactions in history, requiring months if not years of due diligence.
“We should be very clear about the likely outcome of this law. It’s really just a TikTok ban,” he said. “Censorship is not who we are as a people. We should not downplay or deny this trade-off.”
The Bill could also be an issue in the November presidential campaign, with Republican presidential candidate Trump urging young voters to consider a possible TikTok ban. REUTERS
