A bill that could ban TikTok in the U.S. on national security grounds is gaining steam in Congress. In a rare display of bipartisan consensus, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously to pass the bill Thursday, setting it up for a future floor vote. And President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill into law if Congress passes it.
TikTok, a video sharing app first launched in 2017, has more than 150 million users in the U.S. The possibility that one of America’s most widely used and influential social media apps could be banned would be a huge deal. There’s no precedent for it. It raises big First Amendment questions. And there’s no way to anticipate how the tens of millions of young people who use the app would react, either as consumers or as activists objecting to the quashing of a popular platform. Oh, and there’s one more wrinkle: In a bizarre turn of events, former President Donald Trump, who for years sought to ban TikTok in the U.S., has suddenly flipped on the issue and is lobbying against the bill.
In other words, there’s chaos on the horizon.
The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” introduced this week in the House by Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., calls for ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the app within about five months of the law passing or face removal from U.S. app stores. The rationale is that ByteDance’s location in China means the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok for unsavory data surveillance of Americans or manipulate algorithms to meddle in the political life of its biggest geopolitical rival. Under Chinese law, a Chinese company is obligated to turn over personal data that the Chinese government claims is relevant to its national security.
The objections to a possible ban go beyond young people being mad about losing a beloved app.
Members of both parties grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew last year to build…
Read the full article here
