The United States Senate voted in favor of ban ownership of TikTok by Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd.setting the stage for a constitutional clash on whether the ban deprives American users of your First Amendment free speech rights. With this, only Joe Biden’s signature is enough for it to be enacted.
The measure, which also includes aid to Ukraine, Israel and Tawian, obtained broad bipartisan approval from senators concerned about the app’s collection of data from more than 170 million American users, as well as the possibility of China using it for propaganda purposes. President Joe Biden has said he will sign the measure into law.
The legislation It was approved by 79 votes in favor and 18 against on Tuesday night.
The bill gives the company almost a year to ByteDance gets rid of TikTok before the app faces a ban. That sets a deadline long after the election. November, to the disappointment of some lawmakers concerned that Beijing could use the app to interfere in the election.
The company has already promised to fight the legislation in court. The United States is a critical market for the social media giant, which has become one of the world’s fastest-growing tech giants.
TikTok seeks to multiply the size of its business by 10 of e-commerce in the United States this year. This links it inextricably to sectors of the American economy, from millions of content creators to small business owners who depend on the platform.
It is unlikely that Beijing allows any sale of TikTok. The government has made it clear that it does not want TikTok’s precious algorithms nor do its valuable data fall into American hands, said a person familiar with the thinking of the social network, which asked to remain anonymous when discussing the deliberations of the company.
Kentucky Republican Rand Paul argued that the bill TikTok violates the First Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution, and He predicted the courts would overturn it..
The legislation could also ban other apps that the president believes are under the control of a foreign adversary, and puts new limits on data brokers who sell information to foreign adversaries.
The TikTok measure accelerated to become law when Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson decided iInclude it in the aid package for Ukraine and Israel, short-circuiting what could have been a long debate in the Senate. The House approved the TikTok measure in a 360-58 vote on Saturday.
