TikTok: Sell or Ban? US Congress Sets ByteDance’s Deadline

On Saturday in the United States, the House of Representatives passed a resolution again asking TikTok to sell itself but this time there is a timeline. They are giving the Chinese owner ByteDance a year to divest its TikTok US interests or get completely banned as they built on their March threat to the Chinese owned social media platform. 

Here is how they got there. A few months ago, with support from the Biden administration, the Senate pass a national security bill with about $90b in aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and a few other priorities. The bill was killed on arriving at the US House but under pressure from lawmakers some of which were from the Speaker’s party, the bill was brought up for a vote and this time, there was a TikTok addition. 

The bill passed on Saturday against the wish of some hardliners and now as the bill goes back to the Senate, it is expected to pass and from there it will be passed to President Biden’s table to make it law.

Read More: Over 40 Percent Of Americans Want TikTok Banned Says Poll

This means that the fight will be official as we enter the new week but here is what comes next. It is expected that this will drag on in courts and could end up at the Supreme Court which is Republican leaning. This means that there is a real possibility that TikTok could be banned in the United States because it is Chinese owned. 

This could greatly benefit the likes of X formerly Twitter but X owner and CEO Elon Musk doesn’t seem very pleased with that possibility. 

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1781387457193230338

Elon Musk in recent years has been an advocate for “free speech” and since his Twitter takeover, there have been all manner of views on his platform. In fact, the platform has become so free that misinformation has become the order of the day. Elon Musk came up with Community Notes to fact check claims on the microblogging site. But only yesterday he announced a change to Community Notes and from the replies, you will see some are already excited at the possibility of getting fact checked even less. 

But is he genuinely voicing that opinion about the TikTok decision, well we won’t be able to know that but you see, Elon Musk via Tesla does big business in China and has to be careful when voicing opinions on matters like this. According to Bloomberg, In the first two months of 2024, Tesla delivered 131,812 vehicles, marking a 6% decrease from the same period the previous year, according to data from China’s Passenger Car Association. Despite Tesla’s price reductions since the beginning of the year, only 53% of these vehicles were delivered to the local market.