The Senate passed a bill, included with the foreign aid package, that will ban TikTok if its owner, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it within a year. Senators passed the bill 79-18 Tuesday after the House passed it with overwhelming majority over the weekend.
President Joe Biden will have to sign the bill to make it law, and as per a statement released by the White House, he intends to do so on Wednesday.
Notably, in March, the House passed a similar standalone bill to ban TikTok or force its sale with a six-month time limit. However, the Senate never took that bill up. This time, as the bill was tied with critical foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the Senate had to make a decision.
TikTok didn’t immediately release a statement. However, Michael Beckerman, the company’s head of public policy for the Americas, said that the company plans to challenge the move in courts, according to Bloomberg.
“This is an unprecedented deal worked out between the Republican Speaker and President Biden. The stage that the bill is signed, we will move to the courts for a legal challenge,” he said in a memo to TikTok’s US staff earlier this week.
The bill gives Bytedance nine months to force a sale with a 90-day extension — so effectively a year to complete the deal.
Last week, when the House passed the bill, TikTok said it was “unfortunate” that the House was using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to jam through a ban bill that restricts the “free speech rights of 170 million Americans.”
While TikTok operates out of Singapore, the U.S. has been concerned about the data of its citizens, given the Chinese ownership of the social media platform. TikTok has continually tried to assure the government that it doesn’t give out U.S. user data to China with different campaigns.
