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The House of Representatives passed a bill that could ban TikTok in the U.S. on Wednesday with a vote of 352 to 65. Fifty Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against the bill.
The bill — “Protecting Americans from Foreign Advisory Controlled Applications Act” — had bipartisan support in its committee and in the House. Now, the bill is headed to the Senate, where its future is a bit less clear. It would ban TikTok from U.S. app stores and unless it divests from its parent company ByteDance.
Lawmakers argue that TikTok poses a national security threat because its parent company is based out of China and, therefore, subject to Chinese intelligence laws which could, theoretically and hypothetically, force ByteDance to hand over data of the app’s 170 million U.S. users. TikTok, for its part, has consistently denied the claim that user data for U.S. citizens could be accessed by the Chinese state.
In 2022, the app began routing all its U.S. user data to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure in a move intended to assuage fears that the Chinese government could access this data.
The bill is now headed to the Senate where, if it passes, it will hit President Joe Biden’s desk. Biden, whose campaign is on TikTok, said he would sign the bill into law. That would give TikTok five months to either sell TikTok or see it banned in the U.S.
This isn’t the first time the U.S. has attempted to ban the app — then-President Donald Trump attempted a ban with an executive order in 2020, multiple states have attempted bans, and the app has been banned on government-issued devices. TikTok has taken most of these bans to court, and the courts tend to side with the app, saying an outright ban on it is an infringement of the First Amendment right to free speech.
TikTok has been leading a pretty aggressive lobbying campaign aligning with the free speech argument. Just last week, it unleashed a pop-up to its U.S. users telling them to call their representatives and ask them to not ban the app. Congress was inundated with calls.
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