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President Joe Biden said he would sign a bill working its way through Congress that would ban US app stores from carrying TikTok unless its Chinese owner divests the popular video-sharing social media platform.
Asked whether he backed the legislation as he left Washington for Pennsylvania on Friday, Biden replied: “If they pass it, I’ll sign it.”
White House aides helped draft the bill, even as Biden’s re-election campaign uses TikTok to try to reach younger voters. The House of Representatives is next week expected to vote on the measure, which would impose a ban unless ByteDance, the app’s Chinese owner, divests the app within six months.
Republicans and Democrats on the House energy and commerce committee unanimously passed the bill this week, despite a campaign in which TikTok mobilised its users to lobby members of Congress. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has also said he backs the measure.
Biden’s support came the day after former president Donald Trump opposed the bill, even though his own administration tried to crack down on TikTok in 2020 over similar security concerns related to its Chinese ownership.
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckershmuck will double their business,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, in a reference to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
Meta suspended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts following his support for the insurrection on Capitol Hill on January 6 2021 but the social media group reinstated him last year.
In August 2020, Trump threatened to ban TikTok as he stepped up pressure on China at a moment when he was under pressure for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which spread from the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Trump later said TikTok could survive if it was sold to a US company — a similar outcome to the one lawmakers are trying to engineer with the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”.
He issued an executive order in 2020 that was designed to force ByteDance to divest TikTok, but the effort was blocked in US courts. The current bill has been written in a way that lawmakers hope will overcome legal objections related to free speech constraints.
It remains unclear what effect Trump’s intervention will have on next week’s vote in the House, and any future vote in the Senate, and whether some Republicans will shift their position given his status as the unchallenged frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination.
US lawmakers have rejected TikTok’s claim that they are trying to ban the app, stressing it can remain in use as long as its connection to China is severed.
With 170mn US users, more than half the country’s population has downloaded TikTok on their devices. US security professionals, including most recently FBI director Christopher Wray, have raised increasing concerns about the app’s Chinese ownership.
They worry Beijing could access Americans’ personal data because Chinese companies must hand over such information to their government if asked. They also worry it could use the app to influence voters in an effort to meddle in the US democratic system.
TikTok denies the Chinese Communist party has any influence on the app through ByteDance. But US security officials and lawmakers have dismissed that argument and pointed out ByteDance has conceded that employees in China have on occasions in the past been able to access the data of certain Americans.
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