Legislators in the US are apparently competing to see who can be the fiercest opponent of social media. In mid-March, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a law that would force Chinese company ByteDance to sell videosharing platform TikTok to an American firm, or another company not based in an “adversary nation”. In late April, the Senate approved the bill. Should ByteDance fail to act accordingly, a platform with 170m US users might suddenly become inaccessible.
This does not yet constitute a TikTok ban. Alengthy appeals process could follow. But the proposed prohibition has been surprisingly popular. By the time you read this, Joe Biden will probably have signed the legislation, though Donald Trump now opposes a ban, with speculation that this is because Biden has begun taking fire on the platform from progressive youth opposed to his inaction on Gaza.