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The Senate passed legislation on Tuesday that TIC Toc will force its China-based parent company to sell the social media platform under the threat of sanctions, a controversial move by US lawmakers that is expected to face legal challenges and disrupt the lives of content creators. On short-form video apps for income.
The TikTok legislation was included as part of a larger $95 billion package that provides foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel and was passed 79-18. It now goes to President Joe Biden, who has supported the TikTok proposal and said he will sign the package as soon as he receives it.
The decision by House Republicans last week to attach the TikTok bill to a high-priority package helped speed its passage in Congress and came after negotiations with the Senate, where an earlier version of the bill was stalled. That edict gave TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, six months to sell its stake in the platform. But some key lawmakers expressed skepticism that this was too little time for a complex deal that could be worth tens of billions of dollars.
The amended law extends the deadline, giving ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok, and a possible three-month extension if the sale goes through. The bill would also prevent the company from controlling TikTok's secret sauce: the algorithm that feeds videos to users based on their interests and that has made the platform a trendsetting phenomenon.
The passage of the law is the culmination of long-standing bipartisan fears in Washington over Chinese threats and ownership of TikTok, which is used by 170 million Americans. For years, lawmakers and administration officials have expressed concerns that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over US user data, or influence Americans by suppressing or promoting certain content on TikTok.
“Congress is not acting to punish ByteDance, TikTok or any other individual company,” said Maria Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. “Congress is working to prevent foreign adversaries from engaging in espionage, surveillance, and malicious operations that harm vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our U.S. government personnel.”
Opponents of the bill say the Chinese government could easily obtain information about Americans through other means, including through commercial data brokers who traffic in personal information. The foreign aid package includes a provision that makes it illegal for data brokers to sell or rent “personally identifiable sensitive data” to North Korea, China, Russia, Iran or entities in those countries. But it has faced some opposition, including from the American Civil Liberties Union, which says the language is written too broadly and could impact journalists and others who publish personal information.
Many opponents of the TikTok measure argue that the best way to protect American consumers is to impose a sweeping federal data privacy law that targets all companies regardless of their origin. They also noted that the US has not provided public evidence showing that TikTok is sharing information about US users with Chinese authorities, or that Chinese authorities have ever tampered with its algorithms.
“Banning TikTok would be an extraordinary step that requires extraordinary justification,” said Becca Brannam, deputy director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights advocate. “Extending the disinvestment deadline neither justifies the urgency of the threat to the public nor addresses the fundamental constitutional flaws of the law.”
China had earlier said that it would oppose the forced sale of TikTok and this time too it has indicated its opposition. TikTok, which has long denied it poses a security threat, is also preparing a lawsuit to block the legislation.
“At the stage the bill is signed, we will go to the courts for a legal challenge,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok's head of public policy in the US, wrote in a memo sent to employees on Saturday and obtained by The Associated Press.
“This is the beginning, not the end, of this long process,” Beckerman wrote.
The company has had some success with court challenges in the past, but has never tried to stop a federal law from taking effect.
In November, a federal judge blocked Montana legislation that would have banned the use of TikTok across the state after the company and five content creators who use the platform sued. Three years before that, federal courts had blocked an executive order issued by then-President Donald Trump to ban TikTok after the company sued on the grounds that the order violated free speech and due process rights. Is.
After this, the Trump administration made a deal, under which American companies Oracle and Walmart got a major stake in TikTok. But the sale never took place.
Trump, who is running for president again this year, now says he opposes a potential ban.
Since then, TikTok has been in talks about its future with the Secret Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a little-known government agency tasked with examining corporate deals for national security concerns.
On Sunday, ByteDance's top lawyer Erich Anderson, who led negotiations with the US government for years, told his team he was stepping down from the role.
“As I began to reflect a few months ago on the stress of the past few years and the challenges of the new generation ahead, I decided the time was right to turn the reins over to a new leader,” Anderson wrote in an internal memo. Which was obtained by AP. He said the decision to step down was entirely his and was taken months ago in discussions with senior company leaders.
Meanwhile, TikTok content creators who rely on the app are trying to make their voices heard. Earlier on Tuesday, some creators gathered in front of the Capitol building to speak out against the bill and carried signs that read, “I'm one of the 170 million Americans on TikTok,” among other things.
Tiffany Cianci, a content creator who has more than 140,000 followers on the platform and has encouraged people to visit, said she spent Monday night picking up creators from D.C. area airports. Some people came from as far as Nevada and California. Others drove overnight from South Carolina or took buses from upstate New York.
Cianci says he believes TikTok is the safest platform for users right now because of Project Texas, TikTok's $1.5 billion plan to store US user data on servers owned and maintained by tech giant Oracle There is a mitigation plan of.
“If our data is not safe on TikTok,” he said. “I would ask why the President is on TikTok.”