Biden signs bill to force TikTok's Chinese owner to sell app in 1 year or be banned in US

WASHINGTON: Driven by widespread worries among US lawmakers that China could access Americans' data or surveil them with the help of TikTok, US Senate voted by a wide margin Tuesday in favour of a legislation that would ban the short-video app in the country if its owner, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, fails to divest it in the next nine months to a year.

President Joe Biden signed the bill into law on Wednesday.

"For years we've allowed the Chinese Communist party to control one of the most popular apps in America... that was dangerously shortsighted," said Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on Intelligence Committee.

Vowing that TikTok would fight the law in US courts, its CEO Shou Zi Chew told the app's 170million users in US, "Make no mistake, this is a ban on you and your voice."

The four-year battle over TikTok is just one front in a war over the internet and technology between Washington and Beijing. Last week, Apple said Beijing had ordered it to remove Meta's WhatsApp and Threads from its app store in China over Chinese national security concerns.

TikTok says will fight US ban law in court

Asked about the Senate's vote, the Chinese foreign ministry referred on Wednesday to comments the ministry had made in March when the House of Representatives passed a similar bill. At the time, it criticised the legislation, arguing "though the US has never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to the US's national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok."

TikTok is set to challenge the bill on First Amendment grounds and its users are also expected to again take legal action. A US judge in Montana in Nov blocked a state ban on TikTok, citing free speech grounds. The American Civil Liberties Union said banning or requiring divestiture of TikTok would "set an alarming global precedent for excessive govt control over social media platforms".

TikTok, which says it has not shared and would not share US user data with Chinese govt, has told employees it would quickly go to court to try to block the legislation. "This is the beginning, not the end of this long process," it told staff Saturday in an email seen by Reuters.

The Senate voted 79 to 18 in favour of the bill. The TikTok divestment directive won fast-track approval after being introduced just weeks ago.

If ByteDance failed to divest TikTok, app stores operated by Apple, Google and others could not legally offer TikTok or provide web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled apps or TikTok's website. The bill would also give the White House new tools to ban or force the sale of other foreign-owned apps it deems to be security threats.

It could also be an issue in the Nov prez election race. Biden's signing sets a Jan 19 deadline for a sale - one day before his term is set to expire - but he could extend the deadline by three months if he determines ByteDance is making progress. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Monday that Biden was "pushing" for a ban on TikTok and would be the one responsible if a ban were imposed, urging voters to take notice. Biden's re-election campaign plans to continue using TikTok, a campaign official said Wednesday. Trump's campaign has not joined TikTok.

In 2020, then-Prez Trump was blocked by the courts in his bid to block TikTok. However, the new law is likely to give the Biden administration a stronger legal footing to ban TikTok if ByteDance fails to divest the app, experts say.