Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – TikTok on Sunday raised free speech concerns about a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives that would ban the popular social media app in the United States unless its Chinese owner ByteDance sells its stake within a year.
The House passed the legislation on Saturday by a margin of 360 to 58. It now moves to the Senate, where it could come up for a vote in the coming days. President Joe Biden previously said he would sign the legislation.
The move to include TikTok in a broader foreign aid package could speed up the timeline for a potential ban after a previous standalone bill stalled in the US Senate.
“Unfortunately, the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian aid to once again push through a ban bill that tramples the free speech rights of 170 million Americans,” TikTok said in a statement.
Many U.S. lawmakers from both the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as the Biden administration, say TikTok poses a national security threat because China could force the company to share the data of its 170 million U.S. users. TikTok says it has never shared data from the US and never will.
Democratic US Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that TikTok could be used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese government.
“Many young people on TikTok get news (from the app), the idea that we will give the (Chinese) Communist Party the same propaganda tool, and the ability to collect the personal data of 170 million Americans. national security risk,” he told CBS News.
Some progressive Democrats also expressed concern about the free speech ban and instead called for stronger data privacy rules.
Democratic Representative Ro Khanna said on Sunday that he believes the TikTok ban may not withstand legal scrutiny in the courts, citing free speech protections in the US Constitution.
“I don’t think it would pass First Amendment muster,” he told ABC News.
On March 13, the House of Representatives voted to give ByteDance about six months to sell the short-video app’s U.S. assets or face a ban. The law passed Saturday sets a nine-month deadline that could be extended by another three months if the president determines progress on the sale.
TikTok was also a topic of conversation during a call between Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping earlier this month. The White House said Biden raised Americans’ concerns about the app’s owner.