President Biden signed a foreign aid bill that includes a ban on TikTok in the US unless it divests from its Chinese owners. Here’s why it’s happening and how it affects you.
TikTok is once again on the rocks in the US. Congress this week approved a foreign aid bill that includes a ban on the popular social media app unless it divests from its Chinese owners. President Biden signed it today, but TikTok will not suddenly disappear from your phone. Here’s what you need to know.Is TikTok getting banned in the US?
Not yet. When Biden signed the bill, it started a countdown. ByteDance has 270 days to sell TikTok to a company not controlled by a “foreign adversary” before the app is banned in the US. If a deal is imminent as that 270-day deadline approaches, the president can grant a 90-day extension. (Legal challenges could delay things even longer; more on that below.)What counts as a foreign adversary?
Foreign governments (and non-government persons) can land themselves on the US list of foreign adversaries if they “have engaged in a long-term pattern or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or security and safety of United States persons.” Right now, that list includes China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Maduro regime in Venezuela. ByteDance is based in Beijing, China.Why does the US care that a video app is owned by China?
In a recent interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, FBI Director Christopher Wray said TikTok is a “national security concern” because ByteDance is “beholden to the Chinese government,” and could compel TikTok to turn over data on Americans to Beijing.
TikTok users may not care that China knows what videos they watched or liked, but Wray argued that ByteDance could use the data it collects and its recommendation algorithm “for all sorts of influence operations.” That’s a top concern as we head into another election season in the US, though it’s a potential problem on US-owned services as well, as we saw in 2016.
The US made a similar argument when banning equipment from China-based Huawei and limiting exports of AI chips to China.
TikTok has long denied that it takes orders from Beijing. «We have built safeguards that no other peer company has made. We have invested billions of dollars to secure your data and keep our platform free from outside manipulation,» TikTok CEO Shou Chew said in a video message today.How would a ban work?
The bill targets services that distribute, maintain, and update any apps deemed to be controlled by a foreign adversary. In this case, that would be app stores like Google Play and Apple’s App Store and web-hosting services that keep these apps online (including their websites). Details haven’t been ironed out, but if ByteDance fails to divest, Apple and Google would likely remove TikTok from their app stores, and TikTok may lose the ability to host the app on US servers.
