The Senate handed a invoice, included with the international assist package deal, that may ban TikTok if its proprietor, ByteDance, doesn’t promote it inside a yr. Senators handed the invoice 79-18 Tuesday after the Home handed it with overwhelming majority over the weekend.
President Joe Biden must signal the invoice to make it regulation, and as per an announcement launched by the White Home, he intends to take action on Wednesday.
Notably, in March, the Home handed an analogous standalone invoice to ban TikTok or pressure its sale with a six-month time restrict. Nonetheless, the Senate by no means took that invoice up. This time, because the invoice was tied with crucial international assist to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the Senate needed to decide.
TikTok didn’t instantly launch an announcement. Nonetheless, Michael Beckerman, the corporate’s head of public coverage for the Americas, mentioned that the corporate plans to problem the transfer in courts, in keeping with Bloomberg.
“This is an unprecedented deal worked out between the Republican Speaker and President Biden. The stage that the bill is signed, we will move to the courts for a legal challenge,” he mentioned in a memo to TikTok’s US workers earlier this week.
The invoice provides Bytedance 9 months to pressure a sale with a 90-day extension — so successfully a yr to finish the deal.
Final week, when the Home handed the invoice, TikTok mentioned it was “unfortunate” that the Home was utilizing the quilt of essential international and humanitarian help to jam by a ban invoice that restricts the “free speech rights of 170 million Americans.”
Whereas TikTok operates out of Singapore, the U.S. has been involved in regards to the information of its residents, given the Chinese language possession of the social media platform. TikTok has regularly tried to guarantee the federal government that it doesn’t give out U.S. consumer information to China with totally different campaigns.