The U.S. Senate has voted to approve a bill that would ban TikTok nationwide unless Chinese parent company ByteDance sells its stake in the popular app. The development is likely to result in a court battle between the U.S. and TikTok, which argues that the legislation violates the First Amendment.
The bill, which now heads to President Biden’s desk, was tied to a $95 billion package of foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The Senate approved the bundled legislation by a vote of 79-18, after the House passed the resolutions Saturday and sent them to the Senate for an up-or-down vote.
TikTok has vowed to file a legal challenge once the bill is signed into law. In a memo to company staff over the weekend, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, Michael Beckerman, wrote that the legislation is a “clear violation” of the First Amendment. “This is the beginning, not the end of this long process,” Beckerman wrote.
Ahead of the vote, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, delivered comments on the Senate floor about the national security threats posed by ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok. Passage of the bill “goes a long way towards safeguarding our democratic systems from covert foreign influence,” he said, saying that Chinese companies like ByteDance “don’t owe their obligation to their customers, or their shareholders, but they owe it to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government.”
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, suggested TikTok and ByteDance are “weaponizing” data and AI to spy on American citizens, the military, and government personnel, including journalists covering the company.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) spoke out against the TikTok ban bill before the final vote, saying the more pressing “clear and present danger” is the harm kids face from social media apps more broadly, including from U.S.-based companies. “I don’t deny that TikTok poses some national security risks,” Markey said. “TikTok has its problems. No. 1, TikTok poses a serious risk to the privacy and mental health of our young people.”
TikTok has said the bill, if it becomes law, would infringe the free-speech rights of its 170 million U.S. users and “devastate” the estimated 7 million American businesses on the platform. It claims TikTok contributes $24 billion to the U.S. economy annually.
The TikTok divest-or-ban legislation has been opposed by the ACLU and other advocacy groups. “This is still nothing more than an unconstitutional ban in disguise,” Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said in a statement Tuesday prior to the Senate vote. “Banning a social media platform that hundreds of millions of Americans use to express themselves would have devastating consequences for all of our First Amendment rights, and will almost certainly be struck down in court.”
Under the “Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” bill, Apple and Google’s app stores and web hosting services in the U.S. would be barred from hosting any “foreign adversary controlled application.” Specifically, it would prohibit distribution of TikTok unless ByteDance divests its ownership in the app within nine months of becoming law, with an additional 90-day extension possible at the president’s discretion if “a path to executing a qualified divestiture has been identified.”
Backers of the TikTok bill argue that it doesn’t restrict free speech, saying it simply requires apps to be owned by a company that isn’t subject to the control of an adversarial foreign government. As a precedent, the legislation’s proponents point to the 2020 sale of dating app Grindr by Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. to a group of U.S.-based investors, a transaction forced by the U.S. government over concerns about the privacy of the app’s users.
If TikTok is unsuccessful in getting the divest-or-ban law overturned, it is unlikely that ByteDance would sell its ownership stake — and that the app would effectively become outlawed in the U.S. Chinese officials have said the government would “firmly oppose” any forced sale of TikTok, which would represent a technology export and be subject to the government’s approval.
