The U.S. Congress has passed a bill that could finally ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform that allows users to post short-video content. The bill, which contains language that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the US, gives Chinese parent company ByteDance roughly nine months to sell TikTok, or the app will be banned from American app stores. If China doesn’t concede to divest from TikTok, TikTok would be prohibited from US app stores and from “internet hosting services” that support it. That would effectively restrict new downloads of the app and interaction with its content for a platform that has garnered 170 American users. What’s TikTok’s trouble? U.S. Lawmakers are increasingly concerned about the company's ties in China, with fears that ByteDance or TikTok could share data about U.S. users with China's authoritarian government. The trouble is that TikTok’s parent is subject to Chinese law, and the Chinese government is on record opposing a sale. In recent years, China has implemented export controls governing algorithms, a policy that would seem to cover the incredibly successful algorithm that powers TikTok’s recommendation engine. If the Chinese government doesn’t want to let ByteDance relinquish TikTok’s algorithm, the thinking goes, it could block the sale outright. Alternatively, it may allow TikTok to be sold but without the lucrative algorithm that forms the basis for its popularity.
