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Google PlayAfter President Joe Biden told TikTok in March that its Chinese owners had to sell their stakes in it or face a ban, speculation is running rampant that the app’s time may be coming to an end.
The ByteDance-owned video platform is used by over 100 million Americans and blew up during the pandemic. But the Biden administration fears that TikTok has several security risks. The Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives voted on March 1 to let the rest of Congress decide whether Biden had the power to ban the app.
“TikTok is a national security threat. … It is time to act,” Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the Republican chair of the committee who sponsored the bill, said at the time of the vote. “Anyone with TikTok downloaded on their device has given the CCP (Communist Party of China) a backdoor to all their personal information. It’s a spy balloon into their phone.”
Politico reported that Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the most powerful Democrat on the committee, expressed skepticism that the bill was properly written, saying, “We cannot act rashly without consideration of the very real soft power, free speech, and economic consequences of a ban.” In the end, lawmakers voted 24 to 16 to grant the administration new powers to ban the application. The 16 “no” votes were all from the committee’s Democrats.
In February, CNN reported that federal agencies had told employees they had 30 days to remove the app from their government-issued devices. TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, who appeared before Congress in a hearing in March, spoke out on the matter, vowing that the application has never accessed American data.
Each day, the conversation continues to grow around the government attempting to block TikTok. There have been a lot of recent developments concerning the app’s future, and there are still a lot of questions that remain unanswered.
Here’s everything you need to know about the possibility of a TikTok ban.
