The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved legislation by a wide margin that would ban TikTok in the U.S. if its owner, Chinese technology company ByteDance, does not divest itself of the popular short-video app within the next nine months to a year.
Driven by widespread concerns among U.S. lawmakers that China could access Americans’ data or surveil them with the app, the bill was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday and U.S. President Joe Biden , said he will sanction him this Wednesday.
“For years, we allowed the Chinese Communist Party to control one of America’s most popular apps, which was dangerously reckless,” said Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. “A new law will require its Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good move for the United States.”
Asked about the Senate vote, China’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday referred to comments made by the ministry in March, when the Chamber of Deputies approved a similar bill.
At the time, the ministry criticized the legislation, arguing that “although the US never found any evidence that TikTok posed a threat to US national security, it never stopped pursuing TikTok.”
The four-year battle over TikTok, which is used by 170 million people in the United States, 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 WhatsApp and Meta Threads from its app store in China due to Chinese national security concerns.
TikTok is expected to challenge the bill on First Amendment grounds, and TikTok users are also expected to file a lawsuit again. In November, a US judge in Montana blocked a state ban on TikTok, citing free speech reasons.
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