After the trench warfare, the lightning offensive. After two years of endless attempts to ban TikTok in the United States, the House of Representatives launched an extremely rapid attack which led, on Wednesday March 13, to a vote that could lead to the expropriation of ByteDance , owner of the application. The House vote was overwhelming, 352 to 65.
The bill gives its owner six months to sell the application to a non-Chinese operator, otherwise it will be banned from downloading on the Apple App Store and Google Play. The matter was completed in eight days, with the bill introduced on March 5 by two representatives, Republican Mike Gallagher (Wisconsin) and Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi (Illinois). Mr Gallagher welcomed a vote which “forces Tiktok to break with the Chinese Communist Party” : “This is a common sense measure to protect our national security. »
The case took TikTok by surprise, which thought the offensive was contained and denounced a procedure “secret”. But the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 relaunched attacks against the application used by 170 million Americans, due to the surge of videos deemed pro-Palestinian on the social network. President Joe Biden said he would sign the law if it reached his White House desk.
“Do we want TikTok, as a platform, to be owned by an American company or by China? Do we want TikTok’s data — kids’ data, adults’ data — to stay here in America or go to China? The president has a clear position on this fundamental issue”specified Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.
McCarthyist overtones
The Republicans defied the advice of Donald Trump, who said on March 7 that he was in favor of the social network that he prefers to Facebook, from which he was temporarily banned following the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck [déformation du nom de Mark Zuckerberg, fondateur de Facebook] will double their activity. I don’t want Facebook, which cheated in the last elections [de 2020], do better. They are real enemies of the people! »
Elected officials are taken by an anti-Chinese attack, as revealed by the hearing with McCarthyist overtones of the boss of Tiktok, Shou Zi Chew, on March 23, 2023. Like last year, the muse of the radical left, the New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voiced her opposition before the vote: “I vote NO to the TikTok forced sale bill. This bill was incredibly rushed from committee to vote in four days, with little explanation. There are serious antitrust and privacy questions here, and any national security concerns should be exposed to the public before a vote. »
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