Congress is giving one of the world’s most popular social media platforms an ultimatum divest from China or Tik Tok will be banned in the US.
the house today overwhelmingly voted in favor of a bill that requires bite dance that’s the Chinese parent company of Tik Tock to sell the app within 6 months or face a national ban.
The House of Representatives voted on the bill. It was a landslide vote of 352 to 65 with many lawmakers arguing the app poses a threat to National Security.
This is because the Chinese government could force bite dance to hand over data on its roughly 170 million American users which is alleged to be useful to China for disinformation campaigns and even identifying us intelligence targets. However, Tik tok’s owner has denied those accusations.
In 2019, TikTok faced similar situation to sell or risk being ban from US. Then US President, Trump signed an executive order to ban TikTok unless it was acquired by an American company, alleging the Chinese government was using the video-sharing service to surveil millions of Americans. TikTok in response agreed and decided to choose oracle cloud infrastructure founder over Microsoft.
Fortunate for TikTok, the order never went into effect after it was challenged in federal court
