The US House of Representatives voted unanimously on a bill that forces ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company to sell the platform. Failure to offload the popular social media platform, US authorities threaten to completely ban it.
Votes in favour of the bill were 360, while 58 were against. This shows the bill that is will face a vote in the US senate next week has bipartisan support. Further, President Joe Biden has already stated he will sign the bill once it passes the 2 houses.
If signed into law, it will mark the first time ever that the US government has passed a law to shut down an entire social media platform. TikTok which has 170 million American users faced another vote in March that was passed with 352 votes supporting it and 65 members voting against it.
This current divest-or-ban bill is an updated version. It was changed after Maria Cantwell, the Senate commerce committee chair pushed for extension of ByteDance’s divestment period from six months to a year.
Cantwell said: “As I’ve said, extending the divestment period is necessary to ensure there is enough time for a new buyer to get a deal done. I support this updated legislation.”
The House bill, known as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act“, aims to give the government a way to identify social media apps controlled by foreign hostile countries as security risks. This would involve the President working with the FBI and intelligence agencies.
“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 Texas Republican representative Michael McCaul, and author of the bill.
TikTok Battle with Governments
The company has repeatedly said that it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government. Furthermore, TikTok believes the US government is in contravention of its own constitution. By passing the bill, the Chinese app claims the United States is denying its own citizens their First Amendment rights.
“It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate 7 million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24 billion to the U.S. economy, annually,” TikTok said in a statement.
Bloomberg reports that Erich Andersen, an executive responsible for convincing the US government that Tiktok is taking steps to prevent Chinese government surveillance, is set to exit current role.
TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform, surpassing 1 billion users in 2021, four years faster than Facebook and Instagram. Authorities across the world have struggled to control the growth and influence of the video-sharing platform. Last week in Kenya the Ministry of ICT mandated TikTok to start publishing reports every quarter. This new rule comes following concerns of the site promoting explicit content.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced a $367 million (around KES 54 billion) fine on TikTok. This was due to the platform’s handling of children’s data. The fine in 2023 came from a privacy investigation announced in 2021.
The platform recently launched an Africa-wide campaign with the African Union (AU). It aims to educate and engage youngsters, parents, teachers, as well as community leaders on digital safety through in-app and on-ground activities.
