Concerns about TikTok were first raised in 2019, with then-president Donald Trump having expressed the intention to ban it in the United States. But it wasn’t until Mar. 13, 2024, that real steps were taken in that direction.
In 2019, two years after TikTok burst into our collective market of attention, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews the country’s investments abroad, launched an investigation into TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and its direct association with China. ByteDance had tried to circumvent these concerns by basing its headquarters on US soil, which didn’t seem to hold off scrutiny for long. The concerns stem from the app’s suspected ability to send data on over a hundred million Americans directly to the Chinese government.
The House of Representatives bill passed last month, gives TikTok and ByteDance an ultimatum: either sell to a US company or face – what is pretty much, but not outright – a ban in the country.
When could we see the beginning of the end of TikTok in the US?
During a congressional hearing, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew – a Singaporean, not a Chinese national, something some lawmakers had a hard time wrapping their heads around – said the company has plans to maintain all US user data on servers managed by the Oracle Corporation, one of the largest software companies in the entire world.
The CEO replied “Not yet” when questioned about applying for US citizenship which means he has some intention to do so. Chew has also been vocal about his dismay with the vote taken by the House, having defended since the start that TikTok users’ security has always come first and that user data has not been stored in China but in his native country of Singapore.
A total of 66 representatives, including politicians as opposed as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene, voted against the bill, whereas an overwhelming 349 voted in favor of it. The bill called Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which tries to massively curb the app’s influence and ability to collect data, now moves to the upper house, the Senate, where its fate is uncertain.
The bill’s authors have argued that it does not constitute a ban per se, but, if passed, app stores like Google’s or Apple’s would be legally barred from supporting TikTok on their platforms. TikTok has rejected the notion that it isn’t a total ban and has actively taken steps to mobilize its users to help prevent the bill from taking place.
President Joe Biden has confirmed he would sign the bill into law if it was approved. Interestingly, former President Donald Trump, who had tried to take executive action against the app while in office, now expresses concern over the way the ban could increase the power of other social media companies like Meta.
If passed into law TikTok has 180 days to either sell or face the bill’s restrictions. That means, a ban could take place within half a year of President Biden putting down his signature and officializing it. Many of the bill’s critics have argued that 180 is too short of a period for reasonably enacting the wholesale. What eventually happens, and whether TikTok will be taken away from us or simply transform into something else, remains to be seen.
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