Second-to-last hurdle cleared: US Senate votes for forced sale of TikTok.
The US Senate has now also voted by a large majority to force ByteDance to sell TikTok. Otherwise, the app could be banned.
(Bild: Camilo Concha/Shutterstock.com)
The US Senate has passed a bill by an overwhelming majority to force the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok. If this is not achieved within 270 days - i.e. around nine months - the popular app will be banned from the app stores and thus effectively banned. The requirement, which was linked to billions in financial aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, was approved by 79 votes to 18, with Republicans in particular, but also individual Democrats, voting against it. US President Joe Biden had previously announced that he wanted to sign the bill as quickly as possible, and there had previously been massive pressure for the money for Ukraine in particular. ByteDance has announced its intention to go to court.
Attempted influence with push notifications
In the US, ByteDance is seen across party lines as a Chinese company that must bend to the will of the Chinese Communist Party. There are therefore warnings that Chinese authorities could gain large-scale access to data from users in the US - and also use the extremely popular application to exert political influence. TikTok has repeatedly denied this, but did not necessarily help itself when users were sent a push notification at the beginning of March asking them to contact their MPs to protest against the forced sale. This was criticized across party lines as an attempt to exert political influence and could, in retrospect, prove to be one of the decisive turning points in the matter.
TikTok claims to have 170 million users in the US; an initial attempt to force the sale failed under Donald Trump. US courts had suspected that the plans to ban the app were a violation of constitutionally protected freedom of speech. TikTok emphasizes that it does not see itself as a subsidiary of a Chinese company. ByteDance is 60 percent owned by Western investors. The company is based in the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. However, US policy counters that the Chinese founders hold a 20 percent stake thanks to higher voting rights and that ByteDance's headquarters are in Beijing, where it is impossible to escape the influence of the authorities.
China's government has already signaled that a forced sale of TikTok in the USA would not be approved. It would be more likely that the app would be banned. In March, the Ministry of Foreign Trade demanded that the USA should stop suppressing TikTok inappropriately. Western social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Threads are banned in China itself, and the remaining loopholes were recently closed for the first services. The US policy action against TikTok is now complicated by the app's great popularity: although Joe Biden announced support for the legislative plans early on, his team is now using the application for election advertising.
(mho)