TikTok bill signed into law
President Joe Biden has signed the bill calling for the ban or divestiture of TikTok, after the U.S. Senate passed the legislation late Tuesday night. The provision — which was embedded in a $95 billion foreign aid package that fast-tracked its path through both chambers of Congress — gives TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, nine to 12 months to find a buyer or face a U.S. ban. TikTok told its U.S. employees it would mount a vigorous “legal challenge” should a divest-or-ban law go into effect, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.
- The pool of potential buyers for TikTok is small due to a price tag that is likely to be in the “tens of billions of dollars” and antitrust concerns. Even if one were found, separating the app from its parent company “is likely to be messy,” writes The New York Times.
- TikTok isn’t the only ByteDance app popular in the U.S.: The video editing app CapCut and photo editing app Hypic are two others that share a parent company with the social media platform and could also be banned, given the language of the legislation, Axios reports.