The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved a multibillion-dollar package that included foreign aid along with legislation that forces TikTok to separate from its Beijing-based parent company within a year — or face a national ban. President Biden made the law official, signing it on Wednesday.
Driven by national security concernsThe bill gives TikTok owner ByteDance nine months to sell the popular social media platform, which boasts more than 150 million users in the United States. ByteDance could get an additional three months to complete the order if a TikTok sale is pending, bringing the maximum time TikTok has to be sold or banned to one year.
TikTok will still be guaranteed to be available throughout this year’s election cycle; January 2025 is the earliest date a ban could begin.
TikTok supporters outside the US Capitol in March. Photo credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
An earlier version of the TikTok ban passed the House of Representatives in March but stalled in the Senate. That version gave TikTok just six months to comply with the separation from ByteDance.
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Lawmakers in the House of Representatives decided last week to incorporate the TikTok bill into the high-priority $95 billion package to increase the chances of the bill passing the Senate this time.
It worked: The Senate voted to pass the bill 79-18 Tuesday night. President Biden has indicated that he will sign it into law and did so on Wednesday.
TikTok has long denied sharing American data with China and is already preparing to fight the bill on free speech or First Amendment grounds.
“As the bill is signed into law, we will turn to the courts for legal recourse,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, wrote in a memo sent Saturday to employees obtained by The Associated Press. “This is the beginning, not the end of this long process.”
Since last month, TikTok has also been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over its data access practices.
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