The United States Congress announced today that it will introduce a bill that would ban TikTok from operating in America unless it is sold by Bytedance. This is the same step taken by the Donald Trump administration and will now continue under the Joe Biden administration.
For your information, the bill to be introduced on Thursday gives Bytedance 165 days to sell their TikTok business in the United States. After that period, application stores such as Google Play Store and Apple App Store can be fined if they continue to allow applications to be downloaded in the United States. This is a bill that Montana tried to enforce last year but was rejected by the courts for violating the right to free speech enshrined in the constitution.
Our statement on the latest TikTok legislation: This bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it. This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they…
— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) March 5, 2024
TikTok currently has over 170 million users in the United States. As Trump did, congress used the excuse that TikTok poses a risk to national security due to its alleged collusion with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This move was a bit of a surprise because Biden had just opened his official TikTok account a few weeks ago.
TikTok has already released a statement saying that this new bill will violate the country's constitution and will harm millions of small businesses if it is passed. It is interesting to see if Malaysia will do the same. Given how popular the app is in this country, that could be highly unlikely.
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