A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation on Tuesday that would give China’s ByteDance about six months to spin off popular short-video app TikTok or face a U.S. ban, seeking to address national security concerns over its Chinese ownership.
The bill is the first major legislative effort in nearly a year to ban or force ByteDance to divest the popular app, after Senate legislation to ban the app stalled in Congress last year amid heavy lobbying by TikTok.
More than a dozen lawmakers, including Republican Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House China Committee, and Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi have introduced the measure, which is expected to be introduced Thursday Take a preliminary vote.
“This is my message to TikTok: Break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to American users,” Gallagher said. “America’s greatest adversary has no right to control America’s dominant media platform.”
The bill would give ByteDance 165 days to divest TikTok, which is used by more than 170 million Americans, or require app stores run by Apple, Google and others to offer TikTok or provide web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled apps. illegal.
However, the bill would not authorize any enforcement actions against individual users of affected apps.
“No matter how the authors try to hide it, this bill is an outright ban on TikTok,” a company spokesman said Tuesday.
“This legislation would trample on the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of the platform they rely on to grow and create jobs,” the spokesperson said.
A spokesman for the White House National Security Council called the bill an “important and welcome step,” adding that the Biden administration would work with Congress to “further strengthen this legislation and put it on the strongest legal basis possible.”
The official added that the administration has worked with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to address threats to technology services operating in the United States that pose risks to Americans’ sensitive data and broader national security.
TikTok said it does not and will not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government.
The American Civil Liberties Union called the bill unconstitutional, saying lawmakers were “yet again trying to trade our First Amendment rights for cheap political points in an election year.”
The bill requires Senate legislation and will be considered and voted on Thursday at an Energy and Commerce Committee hearing.
The app’s popularity could make it difficult to get legislation approved in an election year. Last month, Democratic President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign joined TikTok.
The bill would give the president new authority to designate apps of concern that pose national security risks and put them at risk of being banned or restricted unless ownership is divested.
The bill said it would cover apps with more than 1 million annual active users that are controlled by foreign adversary entities.
Last year, concerns about Chinese-owned TikTok sparked efforts in Congress to address the risks of the short-video sharing app or potentially ban it. In late 2022, Congress banned federal employees from using it on government equipment.
Last year, the U.S. government backed legislation sponsored by Senator Mark Warner and more than two dozen senators to give it new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign technologies that pose a national security threat.
The bill was never voted on.
The new bill aims to strengthen the legal authority to resolve TikTok issues. A U.S. court blocked former President Donald Trump’s effort to ban TikTok in 2020.
In late November, a U.S. judge blocked Montana’s first state ban on TikTok, saying it violated users’ free speech rights.
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