House lawmakers are urging Apple and Google to prepare to remove TikTok from their app stores.
Unless TikTok divests from China-based owner ByteDance by Jan. 19, it will be unlawful for US companies to “provide services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace,” US Reps. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Translation: No more TikTok on the App Store or Google Play.
In a separate letter to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said: “TikTok has had 233 days and counting to pursue a solution that protects US national security.”
“Congress has acted decisively to defend the national security of the United States and protect TikTok’s American users from the Chinese Communist Party. We urge TikTok to immediately execute a qualified divestiture,” Reps. Moolenaar and Krishnamoorthi wrote.
In April, President Biden signed a foreign aid bill that included a ban on the popular social media app unless it divested from its Chinese owners and sold TikTok to a company not controlled by a “foreign adversary.” TikTok challenged that in court, but a federal appeals court rejected that effort earlier this month. TikTok requested that the ban be delayed until the Supreme Court weighed in, but the DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that, too.
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s 92-page opinion cited a variety of reasons for its denial, including China’s long history of foreign espionage, allegations it spied on US journalists covering the company, and the potential ability of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm to sway public opinion.
TikTok plans to take the case to the Supreme Court, which it says “has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech.”
“The voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world will be silenced on January 19, 2025, unless the TikTok ban is halted,” it tweeted on Friday.
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Numerous parties are rumored to be considering bids for TikTok, including former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, who wants to rebuild TikTok as a decentralized platform built on a blockchain. Earlier this year, reports suggested ByteDance would prefer to shut down TikTok in the US than sell it off.
It’s unclear what, if anything, President-elect Donald Trump will do about the ban, which is set to go into effect one day before his inauguration. Trump kicked off the entire TikTok crackdown during his first administration with an executive order that also called for a divestiture.
Biden rescinded that executive order when he took office but told his administration to prepare recommendations on preventing a foreign adversary, like China, from seizing consumer data from an app such as TikTok or WeChat. He then signed the bill banning the app without a divestiture.
In the meantime, Trump changed his tune, arguing in March that he no longer supported a TikTok ban because that would help his then-nemesis Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The two have apparently patched things up, with Zuckerberg donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. But that move is probably less about a growing friendship and more about currying favor with a politician susceptible to flattery and an administration that could scuttle antitrust investigations into top US tech firms.
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About Will McCurdy
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