President Joe Biden signed a bill on April 24th that would ban TikTok, the shortform video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, if the company doesn’t sell the platform off within a year.
ByteDance has nine months from that date to divest itself from the app, with a potential three-month extension if the president is satisfied with its progress. On May 7th, TikTok sued the government over the potential ban, calling the law unconstitutional and claiming it “subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”
Discussions about banning TikTok have seen politicians in the US and internationally accuse it of being a tool for propaganda and a security risk. Attempts to force a sale of TikTok first began under the Trump administration before culminating in the successful late-April legislative push.
Prior to the law’s signing, a slew of TikTok bans across the US barred the app from devices tied to universities and government hardware at the state, local, and federal levels.
While some experts say there’s no evidence the app has done any more damage or risked user privacy beyond what we’ve seen from companies like Facebook or Google, politicians nevertheless successfully passed a measure to ban TikTok entirely if they can’t force a separation from ByteDance.