The House of Representatives advanced a bill that would give China’s ByteDance six months to divest TikTok or face a US ban on the app on Wednesday morning.
Yahoo Finance’s Ben Werschkul reports:
The vote surfaced national security concerns and scrambled Washington’s usual partisan alliances.
“We have given TikTok a clear choice,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington said Wednesday. If ByteDance doesn’t divest, the company will “side with the [Chinese Communist Party] and face the consequences.”
But the legislation faces major hurdles in the weeks ahead. The Senate has shown less enthusiasm and is concerned about potential legal potholes. The signals from the upper chamber are that it could consider the bill slowly, if at all.
The proceedings in the House were injected with a dose of drama after a last-minute reversal from former President Trump on the issue following four years in office where he’d aggressively pushed for a ban.
Nonetheless, a large majority of the chamber’s Republicans ended up bucking their party’s presumptive nominee and supported the bipartisan bill with 197 in favor and just 15 opposed.
The measure was also opposed by 50 Democrats, with some on the party’s left flank suggesting getting behind a ban could hurt the party with young voters this November.
The overall vote was a broad bipartisan tally of 352-65.
The bill, if enacted, would set in motion a process that could lead to a ban on a key news source for young people and one with 170 million American users. But it’s also an app that collects vast amounts of information about Americans and is owned by a company, ByteDance, that its critics say is under the control of the Chinese government.
ByteDance executives regularly deny the charge and say they operate separately from China’s government. The company previously slammed this week’s bill in a statement, saying “this legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States” and adding it will “destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country.”