President Joe Biden has officially signed off on a bill that requires TikTok parent company ByteDance to divest the app within the next nine months. Should ByteDance fail to do so, TikTok would effectively be banned in the United States and removed from Apple’s App Store.
Biden signs TikTok ‘divest-or-ban’ law
The TikTok divest-or-ban bill was included in a $95 billion foreign aid package that President Biden signed on Wednesday morning.
The bill in question doesn’t explicitly ban TikTok right off the bat. Instead, it gives China-linked parent company ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok. If President Biden sees that progress is being made toward a sale, he can choose to extend the deadline another three months.
Should ByteDance fail to divest TikTok in that time frame, however, the app would effectively be banned in the United States. App store operators like Apple and Google would be barred hosting TikTok in the US.
In a statement, TikTok described the law as an “unconstitutional” ban and committed to challenging it in court:
This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court. We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail. The fact is, we have invested billions of dollars to keep U.S. data safe and our platform free from outside influence and manipulation. This ban would devastate seven million businesses and silence 170 million Americans. As we continue to challenge this unconstitutional ban, we will continue investing and innovating to ensure TikTok remains a space where Americans of all walks of life can safely come to share their experiences, find joy, and be inspired.
The law is the result of concerns around TikTok and ByteDance potentially being a national security threat in the United States. ByteDance has repeatedly attempted to quell those concerns and said that the Chinese government has never demanded any data on TikTok users in the United States. And if it did, ByteDance would not give that data.
Is the United States making the right call by threatening to ban TikTok? Let us know down in the comments.
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