40 minutes agoU.S. Senate endorses TikTok ban or sale bill
Periskopi(2 years ago)
(2 years ago)The U.S. Senate passed a bill late Tuesday that will ban TikTok in the United States if its owner, ByteDance, does not sell it in a year. Driven by major concerns among American lawmakers that China can have access to [...]
Driven by major concerns among American lawmakers that China may have access to American data, or observe them through this app, the bill was passed by the US House of Representatives on Saturday and American President Joe Biden said he would sign it Wednesday to make it law.
For many years we have allowed China's communist party to have control over one of the most popular apps in America”, said Republican Marco Rubio from the Intelligence Committee.
The new law will require the Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good decision for America”, he added.
The four-year battle for TikTok, which is used by 170 million people in the United States, is only one of many fronts on internet and technology warfare between Washington and Beijing.
Last week, Apple said Beijing had ordered her to remove Meta platforms, Whatsapp and Thrads, from her app store in China, due to concerns about national security.
TikTok is expected to challenge this bill through the First Amendment and TikTok users are expected to take legal action as well. A judge in Montana prevented TikTok from stopping in this country, calling for freedom of expression.
The American Civil Freedom Union has said that the ban or request for TikTok's sale would set “a global alarming precedent for broad government control over social networking platforms... If the United States stops a foreign platform, it will spur similar measures in other countries.
TikTok, who has said that he has not shared and will not share data of American users with the Government of China, has told workers that he will address the court in an attempt to prevent this bill.
“This is the beginning, not the end of a long process”, TikTok told his staff on Saturday in an email, according to Reuters.
In 2020, former American President Donald Trump tried to stop the social network platform through an executive order. That order was later abolished by courts, following the indictment by TikTok.
The Trump administration also brokered an agreement in 2020, under which American corporations, Oracle and Walmart would secure large shares in TikTok on national security grounds.
But the sale of those shares never occurred for a number of reasons, among them China, which established stricter export controls for its technology providers. /REL/
