On Wednesday, April 24, president Biden signed the bill to ban TikTok.

The senate passed the bill on Tuesday. The company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, has about nine to
twelve months to sell, and if they don’t it will get banned. Bytedance has posted a message
saying that they aren’t planning on selling it. CEO Shou Zi Chew said that TikTok will overcome
this again, since there have been attempts to ban it in the past.

The bill was passed because they were worried about ties to China and China’s
authoritarian government having access to users’ data. It was also passed as a part of an
unrelated foreign aid package- the package aids Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. 79 members of
the senate voted for the ban and 18 were against it.

TikTok has said that they don’t share their users’ data with the Chinese government, and
they offered to put data behind a U.S. firewall, but congress says that any Beijing-based
company has to answer to the Chinese government, and they rejected the firewall. According to
Isaac Boltansky, they will fight this in court by Autumn. When they sue, the bill will be taken up
by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals; this means that the ban could take up to two years.

Some people find that the law is questionable- research professor Susan Ariel Aarons
says the law is mainly made to punish TikTok and does nothing about the main
problems: data privacy and algorithmic transparency. Robert F. Kennedy Jr says that a TikTok
ban is not about China getting data because multiple intelligence agencies from numerous
countries also take your data.