US will ban TikTok if it doesn’t disconnect from China

The President of the United States, Joe Biden, yesterday signed a bill that obliges TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the popular video-sharing platform within nine months. If the sale does not go through, TikTok will be banned throughout the United States.

The bill, which is part of a foreign aid package, was approved the day before yesterday by the US Senate. Previously, it had passed through the House of Representatives. At the time, Biden said he would sign it as soon as it arrived at his desk, what came to https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1783148434549092614 today.

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In a statement, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew promised to defeat the ban.

Rest assured – we’re not going anywhere. The facts and the Constitution are on our side, and we hope to prevail again.

Chew said.

What does this mean for TikTok?

The owner of TikTok, ByteDance, is a Chinese company. The US government fears that ByteDance could use TikTok's enormous popularity to spread pro-China propaganda and use US users' data for negative purposes. It was for this reason that the bill was drafted and ultimately passed.

Now, ByteDance needs to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company within nine months (although a three-month extension is planned, to be decreed at the discretion of the US government). If ByteDance is unable (or refuses) to sell the highly profitable social network, the law comes into force and TikTok will be banned.

If the ban comes into effect, TikTok will be removed from official application stores, such as the Play Store and the App Store, and the service will no longer be accessible via the web.

However, it would not be impossible for US users to access TikTok. Through the use of a VPN service, a US citizen could access a non-US version of one of the app stores and access the service that way.

Additionally, a person can do the sideload of the application. In either case, however, the inconvenience of doing so would immediately destroy TikTok's user base, allowing competing platforms to take over. Possibly, TikTok would be used by a very, very small percentage of US citizens.

Any ban will face legal obstacles

However, any ban on the platform in the US will likely face legal hurdles. In Montana, the state government enacted a ban on TikTok that was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by a state judge on the basis that the ban probably violated the rights of the First Amendment (First Amendment).

A national ban would almost certainly face a similar struggle. However, it should be noted that the First Amendment can be “bent” in the case of threats to national security, as the US government is classifying this TikTok ban. That's why, the annulment of the law is in no way guaranteed.

The news also comes after TikTok sought to ease concerns about privacy and national security. The company even partnered with Oracle to store North American users' data in the United States. However, that doesn't seem to have been enough.

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