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House majority leader Steve Scalise said the bipartisan bill will ‘force TikTok to sever ties’ with the Chinese Communist Party or face a ban in the country.
The US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a bill that calls for TikTok to separate its US assets from Chinese parent company ByteDance or face a ban in the country.
A total of 352 politicians voted in favour of the bill today (13 March) while 65 voted against it. However, it still needs to clear the US Senate, which will be a harder task.
The bill comes as concerns grow in US political circles that the Chinese government may have access to user data from more than 170m US citizens who use TikTok because the app is Chinese-owned.
🚨 BREAKING → The House just passed a bipartisan bill to force TikTok to sever their ties with the Chinese Communist Party.
This is a critical national security issue. The Senate must take this up and pass it.
— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) March 13, 2024
Those in favour of the divestment have argued that Chinese law could compel companies such as TikTok to hand over data to the country’s government and pose a national security risk in the US. The threat of a ban has been on the table for some time, as TikTok confirmed last year that it was issued an ultimatum by US officials to adjust its ownership.
House majority leader Steve Scalise said on X that the bipartisan bill will “force TikTok to sever ties” with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “This is a critical national security issue. The Senate must take this up and pass it,” he wrote.
If passed by the Senate and made into law, the bill will give ByteDance roughly six months to divest TikTok and avoid the national ban.
“America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the US,” house member Mike Gallagher said last week. “TikTok’s time in the US is over unless it ends its relationship with CCP-controlled ByteDance.”
TikTok has called the bill “an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it”.
“This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170m Americans and deprive 5m small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs,” the company wrote on X last week.
The bill would also create a process for the US president to designate certain social media apps that are “controlled by a foreign adversary” and pose a national security risk. These designated apps would face similar ban threats unless they distance themselves from control by a “foreign adversary”.
‘Effective monopoly for Reels’
Multiple governments around the world have shared concerns about TikTok’s connection with China’s government, with many nations banning government staff from accessing the app as a result. But the US is taking the most extreme route with the threat of a nationwide ban.
TikTok is also facing issues in Europe, as the European Commission recently opened a formal investigation into TikTok as it suspects the company of potential breaches of the Digital Services Act.
The company has plans to store the data of more than 150m monthly TikTok users locally across three data centres – two in Dublin and one in the Hamar region of Norway – over the next decade as part of an initiative called Project Clover. The first data centre in Ireland became operational in September last year.
“Despite increased antitrust measures in Congress, a ban on TikTok will hand an effective monopoly to Meta’s Reels – the company’s short-form video product,” said Mike Proulx, VP research director at Forrester.
“Absent of TikTok, users will flock to Reels – leaving just YouTube Shorts as its sole competitor. That means Meta is the likely beneficiary of TikTok’s ad revenue in a TikTok-less world.”
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