Senate passes bill forcing TikTok's parent company to sell or face ban, sends to Biden for signature

FILE – The icon for the video sharing TikTok app is seen on a smartphone, Feb. 28, 2023, in Marple Township, Pa. Montana became the first state in the U.S. to completely ban TikTok on Wednesday, May 17, 2023, when the state’s Republican governor signed a measure that’s more sweeping than any other state’s attempts to curtail the social media app.

A decision made by House Republicans last week to attach the TikTok bill to the high-priority package helped expedite its passage in Congress and came after negotiations with the Senate, where an earlier version of the bill had stalled. That version had given TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, six months to divest its stakes in the platform. But it drew skepticism from some key lawmakers concerned it was too short of a window for a complex deal that could be worth tens of billions of dollars.

“Congress is not acting to punish ByteDance, TikTok or any other individual company,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairwoman Maria Cantwell said. “Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, harming vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our U.S. government personnel.”

“Banning TikTok would be an extraordinary step that requires extraordinary justification,” said Becca Branum, a deputy director at the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology, which advocates for digital rights. “Extending the divestiture deadline neither justifies the urgency of the threat to the public nor addresses the legislation’s fundamental constitutional flaws.”

The Trump administration then brokered a deal that had U.S. corporations Oracle and Walmart take a large stake in TikTok. But the sale never went through.Since then, TikTok has been in negotiations about its future with the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a little-known government agency tasked with investigating corporate deals for national security concerns.

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