Trump Raises Concerns About Possible US Ban on TikTok – Donald Trump, a candidate for the U.S. presidency, expressed reservations regarding the potential ban of TikTok, just before the upcoming vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. The proposed vote aims to compel ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to divest the widely-used short video platform within approximately six months.
The former Republican president seeking a return to the White House wrote late Thursday on social media site Truth Social that “if you get rid of TikTok, Facebook will double their business,” and added he does not want Facebook “doing better.” On Thursday, the Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously passed a bill aimed at regulating TikTok, a platform with approximately 170 million users in the U.S.
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Under the proposed legislation, ByteDance would have 165 days to divest TikTok. Failure to comply would result in app stores such as those run by Apple and Google being prohibited from offering TikTok or providing web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled apps. In 2020, Trump attempted to ban TikTok and the Chinese-owned WeChat, but his efforts were thwarted by the courts.
Trump said in an August 2020 executive order that TikTok data collection “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
TikTok maintains that it has never shared, nor would it share, U.S. user data with the Chinese government. The platform contends that the bill proposed by the House effectively constitutes a ban. Moreover, TikTok raises uncertainties about whether China would endorse any potential sale or if divestment could be accomplished within the specified six-month timeframe.
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“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” the company said after the vote. “The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free expression.” Gaining approval for legislation from both the House and Senate during an election year may prove challenging, especially considering the popularity of the app. In the past month, TikTok gained support from the reelection campaign of Democratic President Joe Biden.