The United States House of Rep has proposed a bill on Saturday to ban the use of the China-based social media platform, TikTok in its country. The proposed bill which was passed following the staggering bipartisan vote of 360-58 required that the video app be sold off within 270 days or face a ban in America.
TikTok, a China-based video app was released in September 2016 by Chinese internet company ByteDance. The app allows users to make and post short videos with a time range of a few seconds to up to 10 minutes. TikTok, which can be accessed with a mobile phone, crossed a mark of two billion mobile downloads worldwide in April 2020.
The country’s lawmakers had made earlier efforts to ban the social media platform stating that TikTok posed threats to the national security, privacy risks, foreign policy and also economy of the country.
Tik Tok Ban Passes Several Scrutiny
An earlier version of the bill with unanimous bipartisan support had mandated that the founding company of the app, ByteDance, sell-off TikTok within 180 days. However, after objection from Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who stated that the company be given an extended time of up to a year to sell-off, the bill could not be passed.
Fast forward to today, the proposed bill included in a larger foreign aid package promises to aid countries like Ukraine, Israel etc. The ban, if effected, will cause the social media platform to lose its 170 million American users.
Following the proposed bill which will evidently cause a huge loss to the company, TikTok argued that the law will deprive users of their First Amendment rights. It added, “It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate 7 million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24 billion to the U.S. economy, annually.”
It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate 7 million businesses, and shutter a platform…
— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) April 18, 2024
Although the company claims that it cannot give out users’ information to the Chinese government, a recent report on Cybertecwiz revealed that social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok pose security risks.
The report included some privacy loopholes in the policies of the aforementioned companies, like lack of transparency, risk of monitoring users’ locations and a host of others.
