The United States has a Chinese social network TikTok security and privacy issues for a long time. But they are far from the only country concerned about the disclosure of information to the Chinese government. Despite popular belief, it is not always only about “Western” countries, such as the USA, Canada, European countries, but TikTok has been banned in India for several years for the same reasons. A few hours ago, the Senate voted on several matters, which were related to, for example, military aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, other sanctions on Iran, and the ban on TikTok was part of the package. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the bill into law (he said he would once it gets to his desk today).
As for TikTok, in addition to security and privacy concerns, it also has other issues that the government doesn’t like. For example, there are too many pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic posts. The new law says that the social network must sell its American operations to a company that will be approved by the United States as trustworthy, and must do so within less than a year, more precisely within 270 days (the original proposal even counted on 6 months). If this does not happen, the social network will be banned on US soil, i.e. it will not be able to be in application stores (e.g. for Google Android or Apple iOS), at the same time it will not be possible to offer it for download on a regular website (e.g. in the form of APK) . TikTok said last week that the move would threaten free speech for 170 million Americans, devastate 7 million companies and cripple a platform that brings $24 billion a year to the U.S. economy.
