After the vote, the bill will go to the White House President Joe Biden, who has supported the task of TikTok and has said that he will do the signing as soon as he acquires it.
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| Photo: Solen Feyissa/Unsplash |
The Senate became the first roadblock for a legislation late Tuesday calling for TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest while the face of an imminent ban is hard to escape. It is safe to say that the U.S. lawmakers’ move will spur legal challenges and force lovers of this social media platform to radically change their way of creating and watching it.
TikTok was one of the measures included in the $ 95 billion bill on foreign aid to Ukraine and to Israel which were passed in the Senate by the majority of 79 to 18 votes. It is going to the President Joe Biden now who supports the closing TikTok in U.S. as he admitted that he will sign it off as early as he receives it.
'Triangle of Sadness' director Ruben Östholm says the use of cameras should be conditional on the applicant's having a license.
Supposedly controversial policy made by the House Republicans last week that gave them a chance to get attached to the high-priority legislation package and saves the bill from the deadlock with the Senate where an earlier version of the bill have stalled. The earlier one was not very different from the one his company had got six months earlier. Yet, it the theses came with privileging from different schools of lawmakers concerned. The short window was read as inadequate for the interminably complex negotiations that might lead to a transaction in the tens of billions of dollars.
The drafted bill extended the deadline to September, thus giving ByteDance nine months for the sale to close with an option to secure a possible three-month extension if the process of selling the app is underway. The bill would also bar the company from controlling TikTok’s secret sauce: not only a content-generating but also an algorithmic way that lets one see videos depending on their preferences just made TikTok an unsettling cure.
The passing of the bill comes as an ecstasy to US bipartisan lawmakers with existing concerns about Chinese threats concerning the ownership of TikTok; loved by over 170 million Americans. Through the years, the politicians and the administration’s officials are afraid the Chinese can force ByteDance to hand over US user data, or they can control Americans by suppressing some or the list of contents by promoting the other ones on TikTok.
“Congress is not trying to penalize the ByteDance or any of these companies,” summarizes Maria Cantwell the Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. “Instead, Congress is trying to prevent the foreign adversaries from attacks like espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, suffering of the vulnerable U.S. citizens, and the security of our army, ministries, and also the U.S. government officials.”
The opponents claim that the Chinese government can have the information on Americans through other channels, such as the data file brokers who are always in possession of personal information. The penalty that the help package embeds blocks the activity of data brokers to pass this ‘personally identifiable sensitive information’ to North Korea, China, Russia, Iran or any companies in those countries. Consequently, the bill also drew objections from the American Civil Liberties Union which argues that the language is instead written too broadly and can be used against journalists and others that publish personal information.
The legislation's detractors hold it defeating the main purpose of the law, which is the protection of US consumers, by enacting a national data privacy law that targets not only TikTok, but also all other companies, irrespective of their origin. In adding, they take note of the United States not presenting any information to the public that proves how the PRC has ever been given information on any of the apps users, specifically TikTok or how any officials in China have tinkered with its algorithm.
'Sanctioning TikTok would be a very difficult hard step, which was, in turn, accompanied by a very powerful argument,' argued Becca Branum, a deputy director from the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology which dealt with digital rights, while speaking up for its advocacy. “Delaying divestiture based on the claim that such a threat can’t be assessed quickly, and that the legislation needs to be amended, does not justify the exceptional power granted to the government nor does it affect the essential constitutional deficiencies.”
The Chinese authorities have done so till now. This time as well, they have given a clear indication of their stance against this deal.The stock markets are anticipated to treat certain companies with caution because they made large investments over the past few years. Tik Tok has been trapped in a position of denying being a national threat and at the same time is preparing a lawsuit against the legislation to stop it.
“Having the bill signed, we are in the next step of action by filing a legal suit,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, reportedly said in a letter to employees on Saturday and Skimmed by The Associated Press.
Beckerman ended his email with the following sentence: - "The long process has not just started, it is now in its beginning."
The election has stood up in court for a number of occasions, and this time does not differ. However, it never involved the issue of preventing a federal move from a law being passed.
An order prohibiting an application of a TikTok ban in the state of Montana was passed by an American judge in November. This was after a mobile platform and five citizens who create content through this mobile application who filed a lawsuit. So, it is interesting to recall that in 2017, the then president, Donald Trump, had an executive order to ban TikTok application for the prospect of national security concern after a few months of issuing the rule the application sued him claiming that the rule violates free speech and due process rights.
Next, the Trump administration handled the deal with cooperation of the U.S. corporations like Oracle and the retail giant Walmart which would have them take control of TikTok. However, the contract was canceled.
It is still unclear if Trump, who is currently running for the upcoming office, will maintain his support for a hypothetical ban, though.
The soft ban was followed by TikTok in the US in the negotiations of its future with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the USA, a little known agency within the U.S. government that performs investigations on corporate deal for national concerns regarding security.
The following Sunday, Erich Andersen a long-time senior lawyer for ByteDance, lead counselor on the talks with the US government for years, informed his department that he would to relinquish his position.
“It was some months back when I looked within myself and the stresses of the last few years as well as the new set of challenges that lie ahead. I decided it was high time and not my call to pass the baton to a new head,” Andersen said in a severally leaked to AP memo he wrote. He said the decision came totally from him and was an agenda that was discussed long with the company’s leaders.
While TikTok entertainers who resilient on the app are seeking to draw the attention to those voices. Previously, a bunch of press people descended in front the building to protest against the bill, brandishing placards that read “I’m 1 of the 170 million Americans on Tiktok”.
Cianci, a content creator who had over 140,000 followers and had invited people to join her, said she spent her Monday night by giving creators a ride from the airports near D.C. A few folks traveled as far as the state of Nevada and some even as far as California. There were also many people who came from as far away as South Carolina and drove all night or took a morning bus from upstate New York.
Cianci says she thinks that TikTok is the safest platform at the time because of Project Texas which is a one-and-a-half million USD plan made by the shell company- Oracle to store U.S.-users data.
"And if he can't assure that our data is safe on TikTok,” she told. “There is no reason why the President of our country is on TikTok.”
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