Shutterstock
The US Senate has passed a bill to ban the popular social media platform TikTok unless it is sold by its China-based owners.
The social media platform TikTok has found itself in the news a great deal of late, and not for good reasons. Last year a number of governments, including those of Australia and the UK, banned the use of TikTok on government phones.
In November 2023, the government of Nepal banned TikTok to “protect Nepal’s population from harmful content”. In December 2023, the UK government’s regulator Ofcom investigated TikTok over parental control concerns.
Now, the US Senate has voted in favour of passing a bill to ban TikTok in the country if China-based parent company ByteDance does not sell it.
The bill will now be sent to US President Joe Biden, who has previously said he would sign the legislation.
The new law gives ByteDance a year to sell TikTok to a US-based company, or the app will face a total ban from American app stores.
According to an article in The Guardian, the company will likely launch a legal challenge against the bill, arguing it will deprive the app's 170 million US users of their First Amendment rights, which protects freedom of speech.
But why all this furore over a social media app?
The reason lies in the fact that TikTok has, for years, been the focus of scrutiny regarding its connection to the Chinese government and concerns regarding privacy, particularly the sharing of user data with the Chinese government.
While the US government has taken this step to ban the app, governments around the world have shown similar concerns in TikTok’s data privacy policies. Last month, senior UK MPs were demanding action on the app as a national security concern.
In an article published in the Financial Times, Liam Byrne, Labour MP and chair of the House of Commons’ Business and Trade Select Committee, said that while scrutiny of TikTok had focused on the safety of user data, it was the platform’s effect on democratic elections that concerned him.
Byrne is quoted as saying: “The point is about algorithms that are capable of flexing disinformation to the top of people’s news feeds in a way that is totally uncontrolled. If you’ve got an organisation that could be influenced by someone like China, that should be a matter of concern.”
E+T has previously explained the main concerns regarding the privacy debate surrounding TikTok.
