It's official: President Biden has signed a bill that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the United States. The House passed the original bill in March, and the Senate ultimately voted to pass it on Tuesday as part of a $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. The bill passed the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the president quickly signed it. So, TikTok is dead in the U.S., right? Not completely.
What is the TikTok ban bill?
First and foremost, the bill does not “ban” TikTok outright. Although the bill is now law, the app won't disappear from your smartphone right away.
Instead, the law requires TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest its stake in the app to a U.S. company within nine months of the bill becoming law. President Biden could extend that timeline for another 90 days if ByteDance appears to be making progress selling TikTok. (The original House bill had a shorter term of six months.) If ByteDance refused, the app would have faced a ban in the United States. This is a similar strategy to what the Trump administration adopted in 2020: Trump signed an executive order forcing ByteDance to choose between selling or being banned. However, courts blocked the order, and the Biden administration later revoked it and replaced it with an order to review more apps that could compromise U.S. security.
Lawmakers are increasingly concerned that TikTok’s direct ties to China put U.S. users’ data at risk. These concerns were not unfounded: In late 2022, ByteDance employees obtained the IP addresses of American journalists from TikTok accounts in an attempt to find the source of the company's leaks. Back in June, we learned that TikTok was storing some user data from American creators in China after insisting on keeping all U.S. data within the United States.
TikTok probably doesn't get any more data from your smartphone than any other app you use. From an altruistic perspective, Congress may not care much about your privacy. The government's concern, however, is that unlike Meta or Google apps, your data won't be captured by U.S. companies; it will be stolen. Instead, it could leak to a foreign country with which the United States has a complex, even adversarial, geopolitical relationship. In addition to China's potential to influence what U.S. users actually see in their feeds, this has heightened the urgency for many lawmakers to do something about the wildly popular app.
Where should we go?
That being said, TikTok’s expulsion is not certain. Look, this is America: If there's one thing we love about this country, it's a good deal. So now that the bill has officially become law, you better believe that U.S. business interests will do whatever it takes to be the U.S. company ByteDance sells to.
Before the Senate took up the bill, we saw this: Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick reportedly floated the idea of acquiring TikTok at a dinner that included OpenAI CEO Officer Sam Altman. Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is forming a group of investors with the goal of acquiring the app. (Is being "ex" a prerequisite to buying TikTok?) If not, even "Shark Tank's" Kevin O'Leary said in an interview with Fox News that he'd like to buy it application. Perhaps Microsoft, which was in talks to acquire TikTok during the Trump administration, will try again.
That said, who knows if ByteDance will actually sell. But if they are interested, they will definitely choose a buyer.
In any case, TikTok will not be banned until the 2024 election. Now that the timeline has been extended to nine months, with an additional possible 90-day extension, Americans will still have until November 5, 2024, to listen to news and views on the app. The impact on the election is almost certain: Will TikTok prove to be the election-disruption machine the U.S. government seems to fear so much? Will voters punish lawmakers and President Biden for putting the app at risk, or will it not have much of an impact because the app will still work when they go to vote? So much is up in the air about this story: What we know for sure is that TikTok will be around until at least January 2025.
