A bill that would force China’s ByteDance to divest ownership of the popular app has been passed by the House of Representatives
TikTok is reportedly planning to legally challenge the US government if it passes a law that would require the app’s Chinese parent company to divest its ownership or face a complete ban of the platform, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
Over the weekend, the US House of Representatives tied the bill that could see TikTok banned to an emergency bill providing aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The legislation ultimately passed by a vote of 360 to 58. If approved by the Senate, the app’s Chinese owner ByteDance would have nine months to sell its business or have it barred from US app stores.
“This is an unprecedented deal worked out between the Republican speaker and President Biden,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, told the company’s US staff in a memo seen by Bloomberg.
“At the stage that the bill is signed, we will move to the courts for a legal challenge,” he reportedly wrote.
Beckerman had previously insisted that the divest-or-ban demands on TikTok were a violation of the First Amendment rights of the app’s 170 million users in the US and that such legislation, if passed, would have “devastating consequences” for the nearly 7 million businesses using the platform.
“This is the beginning, not the end of this long process,” the executive said in Saturday’s memo, vowing to “continue to fight.”
China has also blasted the efforts to ban TikTok in the US, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin arguing that such a step would violate international trade rules.