On the night of the 23rd, the U.S. Senate The government passed a bill requiring ByteDance to sell the U.S. business of the video-sharing app TikTok. It received bipartisan support from lawmakers concerned that China could use data collected from the app’s more than 170 million U.S. users for propaganda purposes.
The bill, which also includes aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, passed the Senate by a vote of 79-18.
President Biden has announced that he will sign the bill, which was also passed by the House of Representatives, and if ByteDance does not sell within about a year, it will become law to ban TikTok in the United States.
ByteDance, which has become one of the world’s fastest-growing tech giants, has already announced that it will avoid a sale through a legal battle. The United States is an extremely important market for the company. TikTok is looking to expand its e-commerce business tenfold in the U.S. this year.
It is unlikely that China will approve the sale of TikTok. The Chinese government has made it clear that it does not want TikTok’s valuable algorithms and data to fall into U.S. hands, according to one of the people familiar with TikTok’s policies.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said he believed the court would not approve the bill, arguing that it violates the First Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution.
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Original title: TikTok Ban-or-Divest Bill Set to Be Signed by Biden Into Law (excerpt)
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