Social Media
U.S. House of Representatives approves bill to ban TikTok
With 352 votes in favor and 62 against, the bill moves forward and will now be voted on by the U.S. Senate.
The United States is witnessing a historic event. For the first time, a national body has approved a proposal to ban a social media, in this case TikTok. It has been the House of Representatives of the country that has achieved by majority that the project is taken to the Senate, which has the last word to confirm the measure.
The fight in the Senate will be bigger than the one so far. Democrats, led by Joe Biden, favor the bill because of suspicions that the company behind the app is providing user data to the Chinese government. Since ByteDance has access to the data of millions of Americans, the opaque use of this information makes the U.S. government want to limit its presence in the country. Some Republicans, on the other hand, believe that the government is overstepping its authority.
What will happen to TikTok if the bill passes the Senate?
Government officials are already talking about TikTok’s presence on their territory as a “threat to national security”. If the bill passes, ByteDance would have 6 months to sell the app. Otherwise, its presence in the App Store (iOS), Google Play Store (Android), and any other digital store where it can be downloaded within their borders would be blocked.
The geopolitical war between the United States and China is entering a new chapter that promises to heat up relations between the two sides this year. We closed 2023 with reports that pointed to the Biden cabinet’s fear of China’s potential use of artificial intelligence. Examples included the possibility of creating profiles of U.S. citizens by sifting through hundreds of millions of lines of code. Essentially, we’re talking about data collected in a variety of ways, including social media like TikTok.