The House of Representatives has introduced a bill that would give China's ByteDance six months to sell TikTok or face a U.S. ban on the app on Wednesday morning.
Yahoo Finance's Ben Werschkul reports:
The vote brought national security concerns to the fore and disrupted Washington's normal partisan alignment.
“We've given TikTok a clear choice,” U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington said Wednesday. If ByteDance does not sell, the company will [Chinese Communist Party] And face the consequences. ”
But the bill faces major hurdles in the coming weeks. The Senate has shown less enthusiasm, worrying about potential legal holes. The signal from the Senate is that it may consider the bill slowly, if at all.
The House proceedings took a dramatic turn after former President Donald Trump actively pushed for a ban during his four years in office, but backed down at the last minute on the issue.
Nevertheless, the majority of Republicans in the chamber ultimately opposed the party's intended nominee and supported the bipartisan bill with 197 votes in favor and 15 against.
Fifty Democrats also oppose the bill, and some on the party's left have suggested that supporting the ban could hurt young voters this November.
The overall vote was a broad bipartisan tally of 352-65.
If passed, the bill would begin a process that could lead to a ban on an important news source for young people and one with 170 million users in the United States. But it's also an app that collects vast amounts of information about Americans and is owned by ByteDance, which critics say is controlled by the Chinese government.
ByteDance executives regularly deny the charges and maintain that the company operates independently of the Chinese government.company I previously slammed this week's bill. “This bill would have the predetermined outcome of a complete ban on TikTok in the United States,” it said in a statement, adding it would “destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country.”
