TikTok ban looms in America as US politicians vote to outlaw platform
US politicians are set to vote this week on a bill that could ban the popular video-sharing app TikTok unless its owner, tech company ByteDance, sells it. The US House of Representatives is looking at a law that would force ByteDance, based in China but registered in the Cayman Islands, to sell TikTok within six months due to worries about the firm's ties to China.
If the bill gets the green light, it will need another thumbs up from the US Senate before it goes to President Joe Biden, who has already said he would sign it into law. While a smaller group was mulling over the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Controlled Applications Act" bill last week, TikTok users got messages through the app asking them to get in touch with their public representatives to fight against the possible ban.
Despite being flooded with messages, lawmakers passed the bill through the committee on 7 March, giving it the go-ahead for a full vote this week. But it's not just TikTok fans who are against the bill. "The Protecting Americans from Foreign Controlled Applications Act is censorship, plain and simple," says Kate Ruane of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a non-profit group that fights for digital rights in the US. "It is fundamentally flawed and will operate, functionally, as a ban on TikTok in the United States."
Despite worries, politicians in the US from different parties are scared that China's leaders could make TikTok give them user data to watch what people do. Even though TikTok is just one of many online services that collect infomation about its users, the US, and some other places say TikTok is a "national security threat".
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They don't let people who work for the government use the app on their work phones. But no country has shown proof to back up these worries. TikTok works from offices in the US, the UK, and other places too, and it has always said it never got asked by China's government to share data and it wouldn't give away user infomation. But, Chinese rules say that all companies in China, like ByteDance which owns TikTok, must listen to the government if asked.
TikTok has said before that the new law they're talking about goes against the "First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans" - that's how many people in the US use the app. Some of these users are even the politicians who are trying to decide what to do with TikTok, including President Biden.
Tom Divon from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel thinks the argument about TikTok is strange. He says it's "a peculiar dance of advocating for [TikTok's] shutdown over data harvesting and surveillance fears yet capitalising on its vast audience for campaign gains". He believes politicians care more about playing political games than real worries, like upsetting young voters who use TikTok a lot and making people trust the news less.
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