The legislation that would ban China’s TikTok app in the United States unless its parent company, Chinese tech giant ByteDance, sells it could become law within days.
The U.S. House of Representatives is fast-tracking the TikTok sell-or-ban bill by attaching it to the aid package for Ukraine and Israel, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The legislation, which originally gave ByteDance six months to sell TikTok before it is banned in the United States, now reportedly gives the Chinese tech giant nearly a year to rid the app of Chinese ownership.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew ( Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
The House has overwhelmingly passed the legislation to the Senate, which is expected to vote on the matter next week. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has already said that he will sign the bill if it ends up on his desk.
Notably, the extended deadline in the legislation means no action will be taken with regards to TikTok before November, causing some lawmakers to express concern over the Chinese meddling in the U.S. elections.
As Breitbart News reported, the Chinese Communist Party is already secretly lobbying the U.S. Congress regarding TikTok, according to Capitol Hill staffers familiar with the situation.
TikTok has also recently purchased $2.1 million in television advertising in the battleground states in an apparent attempt to meddle in U.S. elections.
If the bill becomes law, ByteDance, which is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, reportedly plans to exhaust all legal measures before it considers divesting in TikTok, people familiar with the matter say.
Ironically, TikTok — which is controlled by a hostile foreign country run by a communist regime that bans their own citizens from using certain U.S. apps — has attempted to pull at the heartstrings of Americans by telling them that their “constitutional rights” are at risk if Chinese communists do not continue to control an app downloaded to their phones.
On Saturday, a TikTok spokesperson said, “It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate 7 million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24 billion to the U.S. economy, annually.”
The initiative to ban TikTok unless ByteDance sells the app comes after years of concern over Chinese communists running a popular social media platform that has proven itself to be a danger for kids and teens, and whose parent company has already been caught snooping on journalists.
Moreover, TikTok is widely considered a national security threat, with lawmakers already having banned the Chinese app from U.S. government devices.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
