TikTok Is Not Banned (Yet)
Breaking news this morning: The House of Representatives passed a bill that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the US. The final vote was 352-65, a clear bipartisan victory for the legislation, which now heads to the Senate for debate. If they pass it, President Biden says he will sign it . While the headlines may make it seem like TikTok is all but dead, that’s actually not the case.
What is the TikTok Ban Bill?
First of all, this bill does not “ban” TikTok entirely. Even if it is passed by the Senate and signed by the President, the application will not disappear from your smartphone immediately.
Instead, the bill would require ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell its stake in the app to a US company within six months of the bill becoming law. If ByteDance refuses, the application faces a ban in the United States . The Trump administration used a similar tactic in 2020 : Trump signed an executive order forcing ByteDance to choose between a sale or a ban. However, courts blocked the order , and the Biden administration later rescinded it , replacing it with an order to review more applications that could potentially jeopardize American security.
Lawmakers are increasingly concerned that TikTok’s direct ties to China are putting the data of American users at risk. These concerns are not unfounded: in late 2022, ByteDance employees obtained the IP addresses of American journalists from their TikTok accounts in an attempt to discover the source of information leaks about the company. Back in June , we learned that TikTok was storing some user data from US creators in China, after insisting that the company store all US data in the United States.
TikTok probably doesn’t collect more data from your smartphone than any other app you use. Congress may care less about your privacy from an altruistic perspective. However, the government is concerned that, unlike the Meta or Google apps, your data is not intercepted by the US company; rather, it potentially leaks into another country that has a complex, if not hostile , geopolitical relationship with the United States. many lawmakers need to do something about the extremely popular app.
Where do we go from here?
However, TikTok’s exile is far from certain. Unlike the House of Representatives, which had strong bipartisan support for the bill, the Senate is unlikely to vote on it outright . While senators like Marco Rubio and Mark Warner are somewhat enthusiastic about the bill’s passage, others, like John Cornyn, are skeptical about the bill in its current form. Some want to see broader language that puts pressure on more apps, not just TikTok, while other senators are concerned about how China will react if the legislation passes.
Another pressure factor is the popularity of TikTok itself. Some senators, especially Democrats, are concerned that passage of a bill that could lead to a TikTok ban would hurt President Biden in the upcoming election. Even Trump, who tried to ban the app in 2020, recently said it shouldn’t be banned , although this is likely fueled by his feud with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, whom Trump partially blames for his 2020 loss.
So, there is no clear path forward in the Senate, at least not yet. We’ll have to watch how this side of Congress fares in the coming days and weeks. However, if the staffer can’t convince the president that banning TikTok would hurt his already abysmal ratings among young voters , he’ll sign the bill into law if the Senate agrees to the language.