TikTok's existence is increasingly threatened in the United States, where it has 170 million users. The Senate has approved a bill that will force the app to be sold to an American company or closed within a period of just under a year. The legislative document will now go to the desk of President Joe Biden, who is willing to validate it, so it is almost certain that the text will become law.
The approval of the law will not mean an immediate ban on the popular short video network. The Chinese company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, will have almost a year to sell the application. If it did not do so, it would be banned in the United States. Although the process probably won't be so direct.
United States legislators have pushed forward the bill on TikTok because they assure that the platform can affect national security, with the possibility - denied by the company - that it collects information from its users that goes into the hands of the Chinese Government. The video platform denies that it shares data of its users with the leaders of China and that it assures that it would reject any request in that regard.
The implementation of the legislative mechanism opens new scenarios, although it seems unlikely that TikTok will be banned within that one-year period. Everything points to the opening of a court process now, since both TikTok and the creators who use it as a source of income will file lawsuits to prevent the legislation from being applied, as happened four years ago when Donald Trump signed an executive order in that sense.
In a letter sent to congressmen this Monday, TikTok vice president Michael Beckerman warned that the law raised “serious constitutional concerns” and criticized that it was being approved “at an unprecedented speed and without even a public hearing.” Beckerman accused congressmen of having “preconceived notions about TikTok based on what they read in the media, rather than the facts.”
