STORY BY AIDEN EISEL, STAFF WRITER
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
President Biden has signed a bill into law that will force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell it to the U.S., or it will face a nationwide ban.
U.S. officials have long been concerned with TikTok’s Chinese ownership and fear that they can share information from its U.S. users with the Chinese government. The Biden administration previously warned that the ban would be enforced if the bill passed through the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The new law will give ByteDance nine months to sell the app to another buyer under U.S. approval. President Biden can also extend the deadline an extra 90 days if there’s progress on a possible sale. This gives them a deadline of January 19, 2025, to sell it. If they cannot agree on a sale, TikTok will be taken off the App Store in the U.S.
TikTok representatives plan on fighting the ban in court, with representatives from the app calling the ban “unconstitutional.” They also said that the ban “would devastate” the app’s 170 million U.S. users and the 7 million businesses that operate through the app. The CEO of TikTok, Sheo Chow posted a video on TikTok assuring users that “we aren’t going anywhere.” They plan to take legal action and “exercise their legal rights.”
Many questions have arisen about why President Biden would want to ban the app as his support for the upcoming election comes from younger voters, especially voters under the age of 30. His stance on the matter is causing his main supporters to no longer support his re-election. Biden previously expressed that he wanted to use TikTok to help his campaign for the upcoming election as an attempt to reach out to younger voters so supporting the ban is contradictory.
Opponents of TikTok say that ByteDance can send out dangerous amounts of influence from Beijing to U.S. users and possibly gain access to the data of U.S. users. Biden also banned the app from most government devices in December 2022.
Former President and presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump has openly opposed a ban of the app, despite trying to ban the app while in office if ByteDance didn’t sell the app.
The owners of TikTok plan to continue to fight the ban of the app and have stated that it goes against the First Amendment of the Constitution.
