The House didn’t appreciate the TikTok original “Who TF Did I Marry”like the rest of us did. Taste issue! By that, I mean the chamber voted to ban TikTok on March 13 if the China-based owner doesn’t sell, the Associated Pressreported. That doesn’t mean the app will disappear from your screens just yet — the Senate would have to pass the bill for it to make its way to Biden’s desk (the president said he would sign it), and TikTok would have five months to sell. If the app is not divested after all that, then we won’t be able to watch Nara Smith make cereal from scratch or wonder how long indie artists will keep getting screwed over by the UMG feud. The bill, passed by a bipartisan 352–65 vote, has an unclear future in the Senate.
Why do they want TikTok banned? Lawmakers say the current ownership structure of ByteDance, Ltd., the app’s parent company, is a national security threat. Citing TikTok’s ability to mine data from users in the United States, the bill argues that the Chinese government could technically use its intelligence laws to subpoena information from the ByteDance-owned app. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among those who voted no on the measure. “This bill was incredibly rushed, from committee to vote in 4 days, with little explanation,” she wrote on X minutes before the vote. “There are serious antitrust and privacy questions here, and any national security concerns should be laid out to the public prior to a vote.” About 170 million users would be affected if TikTok is banned. Their screen time will surely suffer a blow.
- [Associated Press]
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Zoe Guy , 2024-03-13 16:57:38
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