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The U.S. Household of Representatives handed a monthly bill this afternoon that would require TikTok-proprietor ByteDance to offer the common social media application or see it banned in the United States.
Endeavours to ban TikTok go again to the Trump Administration, but the problem has been revived in the latest months. The Household already handed a related bill in March — a monthly bill that the Senate showed minor curiosity in using up. This new model expands the window for ByteDance to provide TikTok to nine months (in contrast to six months in the prior bill), as nicely as supplying the president capability to grant a single, additional 90-day extension.
It appears like the modify has happy some Senate skeptics. Senate Commerce chair Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) informed reporters Thursday that she’d suggested the extension, as it “assures that divestiture will more likely transpire.”
The new bill was passed 360-58, with strong assist from a greater part of each Republicans and Democrats. It is part of a larger sized bundle that features foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and was likely included as a way for Property Speaker Mike Johnson to catch the attention of extra conservative support.
The Senate could take up the package deal this coming week, and President Joe Biden has reported he supports the invoice and will indication it. If that takes place, TikTok is expected to challenge the monthly bill in court docket.
Biden’s administration has been briefing lawmakers on what it claims are the countrywide security threats posed by the application — both of those as a source of data on American customers for the Chinese govt, and as a channel for that exact same governing administration to push propaganda to Us residents. On the other side of the aisle, Home Foreign Affairs Committee chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) explained the application right now as “a spy balloon in Americans’ phones” utilized to “surveil and exploit America’s personalized information and facts.”
When it became crystal clear a TikTok bill was again on the desk earlier this 7 days, the enterprise posted a statement arguing that the Residence is “using the cover of important international and humanitarian assistance to once once again jam by way of a ban bill that would trample the totally free speech legal rights of 170 million Us residents, devastate 7 million organizations, and shutter a platform.”
Civil liberties groups this sort of as the Electronic Frontier Basis and American Civil Liberties Union and have also opposed prior makes an attempt to ban the application.
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