For years, TikTok leadership tried to convince the United States that the popular social media app used by as many as 170 million Americans was not a threat to national security.
It lost that fight Tuesday night when the Senate passed the sell-or-ban TikTok bill with overwhelming bipartisan support.
Tucked into a $95 billion foreign aid package, the legislation gives Chinese parent company ByteDance up to a year to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations or face a ban. President Joe Biden signed the bill into law Wednesday.
Time hasn’t run out for TikTok just yet. The legislation will likely face legal challenges from TikTok and its supporters and government resistance from Beijing.
“This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court,” TikTok said in a statement Wednesday. “We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail.”
ByteDance would shut down TikTok rather than sell if it exhausts all legal options, four sources told Reuters.
“TikTok has drawn its battle sword, and the upcoming legal battle will be lengthy and intense,” said Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg.
Is TikTok going to be banned?
In March, the House voted overwhelmingly to approve a bill to force ByteDance’s hand. The bill then moved to the Senate, where its fate was uncertain.
A few days ago the House Speaker Mike Johnson tied it to a foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel, putting it on a fast track to becoming law and increasing the possibility of a ban in the United States.
The House on Saturday approved the emergency spending package on a bipartisan 360-to-58 vote. The Senate passed the measure 79-18 Tuesday.
TikTok has said it will exhaust every available legal avenue before considering a sale. It has successfully fought back similar measures.
Why does the US want TikTok to sell?
Fans of the app flooded lawmakers with angry calls protesting the TikTok legislation. But lawmakers say control of the app by a foreign adversary poses too great a risk, including the potential for Beijing to use it to collect intelligence on U.S. users and to spread Chinese government propaganda on sensitive topics such as the Israel-Hamas war.
“Many Americans, particularly young Americans, are rightfully skeptical. At the end of the day, they’ve not seen what Congress has seen. They’ve not been in the classified briefings that Congress has held, which have delved more deeply into some of the threats posed by foreign control of TikTok,” Mark Warner (D-Va.), Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday.
TikTok says it has never been asked to provide U.S. user data to the Chinese government and wouldn’t if asked.
Former president Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok in 2020, posted to Truth Social on Monday: “Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok.”
Now that Trump has changed his mind about TikTok, ByteDance could wait out the election to see which party has control after November.
Who opposes the TikTok bill? Free speech advocates
Free speech advocates have spoken out against the possibility of a TikTok ban. They say banning TikTok is the wrong way to address concerns about the practices of social media companies.
“Longstanding Supreme Court precedent protects Americans’ First Amendment right to access information, ideas, and media from abroad. By banning TikTok, the bill would infringe on this right, and with no real pay-off,”Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement. “China and other foreign adversaries could still purchase Americans’ sensitive data from data brokers on the open market. And they could still engage in disinformation campaigns using American-owned platforms.”
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a science and technology policy think tank, also opposes the TikTok bill.
“The TikTok ban is bad policy, plain and simple,” the foundation’s vice president, Daniel Castro, said in a statement. And, he said, “it will not stop China’s techno-nationalist agenda.”
Who would benefit from a TikTok ban?
YouTube, Facebook and Instagram would benefit most from a TikTok ban.
“We would expect Meta to be the primary recipient of redistributed TikTok revenue should the company exit the U.S., with Google the likely No. 2 beneficiary,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Scott Devitt.
Devitt said a recent survey of TikTok users found that 60% would switch to Facebook or Instagram and 19% would primarily replace TikTok with YouTube.
“Ultimately, users will go where their favorite creators are, and advertisers will follow their lead. That makes Meta and Google the biggest beneficiaries of a potential ban or surrounding uncertainty, as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are the most natural TikTok alternatives,” Emarketer’s Enberg said.
What do Americans think about a TikTok ban?
The American public remains divided.
Nearly half of the respondents in a CNBC All-America Economic Survey poll taken in March say TikTok should be banned or sold to a non-Chinese company.
Forty percent of Democrats and 60% of Republicans support a ban or a sale of the popular app, the survey found.
