The House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday that could lead to the banning of TikTok in the United States unless its parent company, ByteDance, based in Beijing, sells its stake in the popular social media platform.
The bill, named the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, received overwhelming bipartisan support, with 352 votes in favor and 65 opposed. Notably, 197 Republicans and 155 Democrats voted in favor, while 15 Republicans and 50 Democrats voted against it. One Democrat abstained from voting.
The House expedited the passage of the legislation by employing a procedure requiring the support of two-thirds of members for approval.
The bill will now move to the Senate for consideration. President Biden has expressed his commitment to signing the legislation into law. If enacted, the law would compel ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok within six months, failing which the app would be prohibited from being available on U.S. app stores and web-hosting services.
TikTok has been a subject of scrutiny among lawmakers who have expressed concerns over the potential for the Chinese government to access the data of its 170 million American users through ByteDance. Lawmakers cite Chinese national security laws, which mandate organizations to cooperate with intelligence gathering efforts, as grounds for their concerns. Despite TikTok’s consistent denial of any such collaboration with the Chinese government for espionage purposes, the apprehension persists.
“Americans need to ask themselves whether they want to give the Chinese government the ability to control access to their data, whether they want to give the Chinese government the ability to control the information they get through the recommendation algorithm,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told House Intelligence Committee members on Tuesday, adding that the Chinese government could compromise Americans’ devices through the software.
TikTok, which is owned by the China-based parent company ByteDance, has launched a robust lobbying effort aimed at defeating the legislation. The company contends that the proposed law would infringe upon the First Amendment rights of its 170 million users in the United States and adversely affect numerous small businesses that depend on the platform for their operations.
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