UPDATE: President Biden has signed the bill into law.
Bad news for TikTok fans: The US Senate passed a bill today that would force the app to either sell to the US or be banned outright in the region.
The bill, first introduced and approved by the House early last month, was repackaged this week as a broader foreign aid push to speed up a vote in the Senate. The Senate voted today on the combined proposal, which also includes: Provisions regarding military aid to Ukraine and Israel, and humanitarian aid to Gaza.
The final vote on the bill was 79 in favor and 18 against.
This means the TikTok ban bill will now go to US President Joe Biden for approval, who has already said he will sign the bill once it reaches his desk.
This is expected to happen tomorrow, meaning TikTok will be forced to sell in order to distance itself from Chinese ownership, increasing the risk that the app will be used as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This appears to be the main concern of the US authorities, with the second issue being the transfer of US user data to China, which reportedly still happens despite TikTok's assurances that it is a completely separate entity. However, the company's pledges and promises apparently did not go far enough, including a $1 billion plan to move all US user data to data centers located in the US.
Nonetheless, TikTok will likely be forced to sell anyway.
The full extent of the risk is difficult to assess because, although US senators have been briefed on the subject by a range of cybersecurity experts, the public has not been given much information about the specifics of how TikTok could be used as an vector for Chinese influence.
The main objective of this bill Addressing concerns about “the potential impact of foreign adversaries on the American people.” As tensions between the U.S. and China rise on multiple fronts, the main argument here is that, theoretically or not, based on China's extensive history of influence tactics and TikTok's own direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok could be used as a propaganda tool to influence American voters.
In China, for example, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, works closely with the Chinese government on content moderation and regulation, and while these controls do not extend to TikTok, which operates solely outside of China, China's history of influence operations in other countries means that TikTok could certainly be a similar target.
For example, in 2022, Google It disrupted more than 50,000 instances of a Chinese influence program called “Dragon Bridge.” Numerous instances of Chinese influence activity detected on YouTube, Blogger and AdSense, company Approximately 5,000 Facebook profiles In the third quarter of last year alone, one such program was linked. Recently, Microsoft The committee warned that it had found various China-based groups attempting to influence voters in other countries, including the United States, through coordinated social media activities.
Taking all this into consideration, TikTok appears to be a potential threat, and US senators have determined that TikTok poses too much of a risk to be allowed in the US in its current state.
So what happens next?
Assuming Biden signs the bill as promised, ByteDance has nine months to sell TikTok to a US-based owner or it will have to remove the app from the territory.
If ByteDance meets the requirements of its appeal, it could be extended for another 30 days, so essentially, TikTok will likely be around until at least this time next year before disappearing completely.
And while it is expected that within this period the parties can reach an agreement to keep the platform operating, things could be complicated by the Chinese government, which would rather be banned than comply with what it sees as overreach and has made clear it opposes a forced sale.
So the political battle could lead to TikTok being banned permanently, or it could be sold to an interested party that could continue to operate it away from its Chinese owners.
Can TikTok continue to operate on its ByteDance-owned algorithm, or would it be an equally appealing platform without it?
If Biden signs it soon, as is expected, many questions will be raised in the coming weeks.
