The US Senate voted to wide margin late Tuesday in favor of legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States if its owner, Chinese tech firm ByteDance, fails to sell and divest the popular short video app within 1 year, reports " Reuters".
Driven by widespread concerns among US lawmakers that China could access and monitor Americans' data through the app, the bill passed the US House of Representatives on Saturday and US President Joe Biden said it would signed it into law on Wednesday.
"For years, we allowed the Chinese Communist Party to control one of America's most popular apps, which was dangerously short-sighted," Senator Marco Rubio said, "The new law will require its Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good move for America."
When asked about the Senate vote, China's foreign ministry on Wednesday referred to comments the ministry made in March when the House of Representatives passed a similar bill.
At the time, the ministry criticized the legislation, arguing that "even though the US never found any evidence that TikTok posed a threat to US national security, they never stopped prosecuting TikTok.
The four-year battle over TikTok, which is used by 170 million people in the United States, is just one front in the war for technological and Internet supremacy between Washington and Beijing. Last week, Apple said Beijing had ordered it to remove Meta Platforms, WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China over concerns about China's national security.
The American Civil Liberties Union said banning or requiring the sale of TikTok would "set a troubling global precedent for excessive state control of social media platforms. If the United States now bans a platform owned by foreign nationals, it will lead to similar measures from other countries."
TikTok, which says it has not and will not share US user data with the Chinese government, did not immediately comment but told officials it would quickly go to court to try to block the legislation.< /p>
"This is the beginning, not the end, of this long process," TikTok warned its staff on Saturday in an email seen by "Reuters".
The Senate voted 79-18 in favor of the bill, which was tied to a measure to provide $95 billion in mostly military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The TikTok sales directive won swift approval after it was introduced just weeks ago.