When will TikTok be shut down and why will it be banned in the US?

The U.S. government is continuing its legal battle to ban TikTok from the country. Under suspicion that the company behind the app, ByteDance, is handing over information on U.S. citizens to the Chinese government, a bill has been moving forward in recent months, and on April 23, the U.S. Senate passed the bill. The future of TikTok in the country is now in the hands of President Joe Biden.

How much time does TikTok have and what could happen?

At this point, it is a matter of time before the bill is signed into law by President Biden. If that happens, ByteDance would have nine months - with the possibility of an additional ninety-day extension - to divest, or the U.S. government would ban Apple and Google from hosting the application.

However, this process may take longer because if approved, TikTok could take legal action and challenge it in court as a violation of the First Amendment, one that will have “devastating consequences,” according to Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, as reported by Variety. “We will continue to fight. This is the beginning, not the end, of this long process.”

TikTok has been at the center of many debates due to its controversial origins. The platform has been accused of all sorts of things: violating the privacy of its users, mental health issues, spreading fake news, among others. One of the recurring concerns at the state level is the real possibility that the data collected by this social network could be used for profiling by elements hostile to national security. And this is precisely the reasoning behind the main drivers of the law banning TikTok in the United States: to protect the nation’s security.

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.