The U.S. government moved closer to banning the video social media app TikTok on Apr. 24, 2024, after President Joe Biden signed into law a $95 billion foreign aid bill. The law includes a provision to force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to either sell its American holdings to a U.S. company or face a ban on the app in the country.
TikTok has said it will fight any effort to force a sale.
The proposed legislation was motivated by a set of national security concerns. For one, ByteDance can be required to assist the Chinese Communist Party in gathering intelligence, according to the Chinese National Intelligence Law. In other words, the data TikTok collects can, in theory, be used by the Chinese government.
Furthermore, TikTok’s popularity in the United States, and the fact that many young people get their news from the platform — one-third of Americans under the age of 30 — turns it into a potent instrument for Chinese political influence.
Indeed, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently claimed that TikTok accounts run by a Chinese propaganda arm of the government targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022, and the Chinese Communist Party might attempt to influence the U.S. elections in 2024 in order to sideline critics of China and magnify U.S. social divisions.