After being voted for approval by the US House of Representatives to pass it on Saturday, followed by Tuesday"s vote to pass it in the US Senate, the bill that could cause TikTok to be banned completely in the United States was signed into law today by US President Joe Biden.
CNBC reports that the bill signing was part of a package that mostly concentrated on approving funding for military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Under the terms of the law, TikTok"s China-based parent company ByteDance must sell off its interest in the popular social network 270 days from today. Biden does have the option of approving a 90-day extension of that deadline if the Biden Administration feels a deal to sell TikTok is close to happening.
However, if such a deal is not reached by either the current deadline or the extension, the US government could make a decision to ban the TikTok app from US app stores.
Lawmakers on both the Republican and Democratic sides have been stating for years that ByteDance could take personal info from TikTok and sell it to the Chinese government. ByteDance has repeatedly denied these claims, and the government has offered little to no evidence that ByteDance would make such a move.
In a post on the official TikTok Policy X (formerly Twitter) account, the company has already stated it will fight this law in court and it believes "the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail." It added:
The fact is, we have invested billions of dollars to keep U.S. data safe and our platform free from outside influence and manipulation. This ban would devastate seven million businesses and silence 170 million Americans.
There"s no word yet on when ByteDance might file a lawsuit to fight this new TikTok law.