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The legislation that forces TikTok’s owners to sell the company or else risk being banned from the United States – aka the “TikTok Ban” – was signed into law on Wednesday. Although it was originally passed as a standalone bill in the House of Representatives back in March, it stalled in the Senate. The House ended up revising it and putting it into a larger foreign aid package that contained funding for Ukraine and Israel, where it passed in both chambers of Congress before heading over to President Biden to be signed.
The TikTok ban has been a long-time coming. TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has been raising alarm bells for government officials for a few years now. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have said that they’ve seen alarming intelligence briefings that convinced them to take action. ByteDance will now have 270 days – approximately nine months – to find new owners or else risk being taken out from US app stores and any “internet hosting services” that support it. There’s a lot of moving parts, and CNN has a good breakdown of it all.
What does the TikTok legislation do? The bill that Biden signed gives TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, 270 days to sell TikTok. Failure to do so would lead to significant consequences: TikTok would be prohibited from US app stores and from “internet hosting services” that support it. That would effectively restrict new downloads of the app and interaction with its content. Biden’s decision to sign the bill on Wednesday puts the deadline for a sale at January 19, 2025. Under the legislation, however, Biden could extend the deadline another 90 days if he determines the company’s made progress toward a sale, giving TikTok potentially up to a year before facing a ban.
What is TikTok saying? TikTok is threatening legal action to oppose the law. In a video posted to TikTok, company CEO Shou Chew told users, “Rest assured: we aren’t going anywhere. We are confident and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts. The facts and the Constitution are on our side and we expect to prevail.” In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson called the law “unconstitutional” and said it “would devastate” the platform’s 170 million US users and 7 million businesses that operate on the app.
What does this mean for my use of the app? If TikTok can’t separate from ByteDance by the deadline, then US TikTok users could hypothetically be cut off by mid-January. But that is still a big “if.” So for now, TikTok fans can continue using the app as before, though they might begin to see more creators — or the company itself — speaking out in the app to oppose the legislation.
What are TikTok’s options? TikTok promised to take the US government to court if Biden signed the bill. In a memo on Saturday, a top TikTok executive wrote to employees that this would be the “beginning, not the end” of a long process to challenge what the company calls unconstitutional legislation that censors Americans’ speech rights and that would harm small businesses that depend on the app. In March, Chew vowed to continue fighting, “including (by) exercising our legal rights.”
Does TikTok have a case? First Amendment experts say a bill that has the ultimate effect of censoring TikTok users could be shot down by the courts. “Longstanding Supreme Court precedent protects Americans’ First Amendment right to access information, ideas, and media from abroad,” said Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “By banning TikTok, the bill would infringe on this right, and with no real pay-off. China and other foreign adversaries could still purchase Americans’ sensitive data from data brokers on the open market.” A court challenge could lead to the measure being temporarily blocked while the litigation plays out, likely over multiple years. But if a court declines to grant a temporary injunction, TikTok could have to scramble to comply with the law.
So what if TikTok gets sold to someone else? The trouble is that TikTok’s parent is subject to Chinese law, and the Chinese government is on record opposing a sale. In recent years, China has implemented export controls governing algorithms, a policy that would seem to cover the incredibly successful algorithm that powers TikTok’s recommendation engine. If the Chinese government doesn’t want to let ByteDance relinquish TikTok’s algorithm, the thinking goes, it could block the sale outright. Alternatively, it may allow TikTok to be sold but without the lucrative algorithm that forms the basis for its popularity.
Can TikTok still succeed without its algorithm? That would be the difficult question facing the company in the event of a forced sale. Without the secret sauce that has propelled the app to 170 million US users, the app could be as good as dead.
The original version of the bill that passed the House in March had given ByteDance an earlier deadline to sell, which would have been before the presidential election in November. This clears that hurdle, but is likely to be a huge sticking point. Trump, who is *snorts* famously tough on China, was originally in favor of the forced sale but did a flip flop on it a few weeks ago after talking to one of his billionaire donor friends who just happens to have a large financial stake in TikTok. I already see chaos agents on Twitter threatening to burn it all down over a f–cking app, so this could be an annoying wrench in an election where so much is already at stake.
This is not an unprecedented thing, either. In 2020, the government forced the Chinese company that owned Grindr to sell to a US company amidst similar security concerns. I don’t have TikTok so I don’t have skin in the game either way, I but am curious to hear people’s thoughts outside of the Twitter hysterics. I just spent some time on Legal Reddit and even there, it seems to be a debate over if the courts decide that this is an issue regarding whether or not a foreign government has the rights to operate within the US or if it’s infringing upon Americans’ rights to use the app. Personally, I feel like national security is the bigger issue here and that shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you have people like Elizabeth Warren and Tom Cotton voting the same way based on briefings that they’re privy to and we aren’t, then there is something there.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew responds to the bill that could ban the app: “Make no mistake, this is a ban, a ban of TikTok and a ban on you and your voice.”
“Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere.”
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) April 24, 2024
TikTok stars Addison Rae, Charlie and Dixie D’amelio and Bella Poarch are shown. Header photo is of TikTok CEO Shou Chew. Credit: Getty and Avalon.red