US Senate passes Bill to get Tiktok sold or banned

Washington, April 24: The US Senate voted by a wide margin late on Tuesday in favour of legislation that would ban Tiktok in the United States if its owner, the Chinese tech firm Bytedance, fails to divest the popular short video app over the next nine months to a year.

Driven by widespread worries among US lawmakers that China could access Americans’ data or surveil them with the app, the bill was passed by the US House of Representatives on Saturday and US President Joe Biden has said he will sign it into law on Wednesday.

“For years we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist party to control one of the most popular apps in America that was dangerously shortsighted,” said Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee.

“A new law is going to require its Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good move for America.”

Asked about the Senate’s vote, the Chinese foreign ministry referred on Wednesday 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 “though the US has never found any evidence of Tiktok posing a threat to the US’S 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 blocked a state ban on Tiktok, citing free speech grounds.

The American Civil Liberties Union said banning or requiring divestiture