President Joe Biden signed a bill on April 24th that would ban TikTok, the shortform video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, if the company doesn’t sell the platform off within a year. ByteDance has nine months from that date to divest itself from the app, with a potential three-month extension if the president is satisfied with its progress. On May 7th, TikTok sued the government over the potential ban, calling the law unconstitutional and claiming it “subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”
Discussions about banning TikTok have seen politicians in the US and internationally accuse it of being a tool for propaganda and a security risk. Attempts to force a sale of TikTok first began under the Trump administration before culminating in the successful late-April legislative push.
Prior to the law’s signing, a slew of TikTok bans across the US barred the app from devices tied to universities and government hardware at the state, local, and federal levels.
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