On Tuesday, 5 March, the US Congress introduced a bill that would require the Chinese company ByteDance to abandon the TikTok social network to avoid a ban on the video application in the country. This was reported by CNBC, according to Kommersant Ukrainian
The draft law submitted by US lawmakers is called the “Protecting Americans from Applications Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act”.
The text of the law states that TikTok is considered an application controlled by a foreign adversary, posing a threat to the national security of the United States.
“My message to TikTok is: cut ties with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to American users,”
– said Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
It is noted that if the bill is passed, ByteDance will be given about five months to abandon TikTok. During this period, hosting companies and app stores, including those owned by Apple and Google, will be required to stop supporting TikTok and other ByteDance-related apps.
“This bill is directly aimed at banning TikTok, regardless of the authors’ attempts to diversify it. It violates the free speech rights of 170 million Americans and deprives 5 million small businesses of the platform they rely on to grow and create jobs,”
– a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement.
It should be noted that in 2022, President Joe Biden signed a law aimed at banning access to and use of TikTok on government devices, and other states have introduced similar state bans on TikTok apps.
Prior to that, Donald Trump, Biden’s predecessor in the White House, claimed that TikTok posed a national security threat because it collected data from American users that could then be accessed by the Chinese government. In mid-2020, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States issued a ruling that ByteDance must sell its US assets within 90 days.