Biden signs TikTok ban bill into law: how long can it be used?
Joe Biden has signed a bill that could ban TikTok in the US if the apps owners don’t sell up but the popular social media app wouldn’t disappear right away.
The popular social media app TikTok once again is facing a ban in the United States, unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance sells it to a new owner in a non-adversarial country. The law is included in a bill for tens of billions of dollars of weapons to America’s allies.
The Senate passed the legislation on Tuesday by a vote of 79 to 18 and Biden signed the bill into law the following day. The clock is now counting down to TikTok being formally banned in the US or its parent company divesting its stake in the social media app.
The modified version of the TikTok ban would extend the amount of time that its Chinese parent company would have to divest from the social media app. ByteDance would now have up to 360 days to sell its stake in the platform, twice as long as in the previous bill. That contemplates six months to sell, plus an additional three months if negotiations are ongoing.
But, that doesn’t take into account legal challenges that may lengthen that amount of time if not outright stop the clock altogether as has happened with previous attempts to ban TikTok in the US. And even were the proposed law to come into effect and ByteDance refused to sell TikTok, the social media app wouldn’t disappear from its 170 million users’ devices.
What would happen with TikTok if it is banned?
Users would no longer be able to download updates for the app, since Apple and Google would be barred from supplying them. That would mean over time TikTok would function more slowly, become buggy and eventually unusable. Basically, a death by a thousand cuts for TikTok over time.
Could you use a VPN to access TikTok? There are always cracks in any wall, however, using a virtual private network (VPN) may not be a sure-fire way to keep using TikTok for American users. Douglas Schmidt, an engineering professor at Vanderbilt told CNBC that “There will almost always be ways around this. It would just be a lot more difficult for the average person to do it without getting an advanced degree in computer security or something.”
Furthermore, Gerald Kasulis, a vice president at NordVPN, told the media outlet that technology exists which can detect users trying to access an app via a VPN. Not to mention that a user’s location would be discovered when app store credentials to download upgrades were asked for.