The legislation would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the popular app or be banned in the U.S., and it was included as part of a foreign aid bill the House is passed in a Saturday vote.
The House has already approved similar legislation, but the new language extended the timeline for ByteDance to sell TikTok from six months to roughly a year, a change that moved Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to support the bill.
The House passed the foreign aid package as a four-point bill that was sent to the Senate as one measure. It also included long-sought aid to Ukraine and Israel, and there may be pressure on senators not to divide up the package.
President Biden has already signaled his support for the overall measure and the TikTok provisions.
Despite those negative signs, TikTok, its impassioned users and some lawmakers appear ready to continue their crusade against the ban.
“I think if anything people are just starting to activate,” TikTok user and small business owner Nadya Okamoto told The Hill Friday.
Okamoto is the co-founder of period care brand August and a TikTok creator with 4.1 million followers. She led an open letter signed by other TikTok creators addressed to Biden earlier this week urging him to oppose the legislation.
Okamoto believes the pressure campaign is still growing and that people are still reacting to how swiftly the new threat to the social media platform came into being.
After the new legislation was put out this week, there was a sense of “‘Oh, shit, we have to take this seriously and we need to activate” within the TikTok community, she said.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
