US app stores will be banned from carrying TikTok in 270 days unless its Chinese owner sells the video-sharing platform after Congress passed a security package that includes measures to counter threats from China.
The Senate on Tuesday voted 79-18 to approve the legislation, firing the starting gun for ByteDance to divest TikTok to avoid the ban. TikTok is expected to bring legal action in an effort to block the legislation after a lobbying campaign failed to dent Congressional support for the bill.
President Joe Biden has pledged to sign the $95bn package passed by the Senate, which includes funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. His team helped draft the TikTok language with members of the House China committee, which introduced the bill last month.
Banning TikTok from stores would mean the app would no longer receive updates, making it increasingly difficult to use as operating systems evolve, eventually rendering it obsolete.
The bill rapidly gained traction after briefings from security officials who warned that Beijing could force ByteDance to hand over the personal data of the 170mn Americans who use the app.
The House passed the bill last month, but it faced hurdles in the Senate over concerns about free speech. In a move that helped fast-track the measure, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson bundled it with funding for Ukraine, creating a package that most senators would be very unlikely to oppose.
Speaking in the Senate earlier on Tuesday, Maria Cantwell, the Democratic head of the commerce committee who previously had reservations about the bill, urged her colleagues to back it.
“Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance blind operations, harming vulnerable Americans our servicemen and women and our US government personnel,” she said.
TikTok has denied that the Chinese government has any control over the app. But Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate intelligence committee, on Tuesday said the fact that the Chinese government had lobbied members of Congress on the bill indicated “how dearly [Chinese president] Xi Jinping is invested in this product”.
Senators also urged younger Americans to understand that Congress was trying to protect them and not trying to ban the popular app.
“Many Americans, particularly young Americans, are rightfully sceptical,” Warner said. “At the end of the day, they’ve not seen what Congress has seen. They’ve not been in the classified briefings that Congress has held, which have delved more deeply into some of the threat posed by foreign control of TikTok.”
The Trump administration previously tried to ban TikTok, but the company blocked the move in the courts. The Biden administration and Congress hope that the new bill will have a better chance of withstanding legal scrutiny.
“The House vote underscores the fading influence of China’s corporate champions in Washington,” said Craig Singleton, a China expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “TikTok’s loss, despite its massive lobbying machine, sets a troubling precedent for other Chinese companies seeking to stave off regulation, such as drone manufacturer DJI.”
Most China experts in Washington do not think Beijing will let ByteDance hand over the algorithm that has made the app so successful, raising the spectre of the end of TikTok’s presence in the US, unless it succeeds in court.
