For TikTok, the clock has started running in its existential fight to avoid a U.S. ban.
Legislation requiring the social media app’s Chinese owners to divest sailed through Congress, capped by Senate passage late Tuesday as part of a larger foreign-aid package. President Joe Biden plans to sign it Wednesday—beginning a 270-day countdown for a sale or a U.S. prohibition of the popular video-sharing platform.
TikTok and Beijing-based ByteDance have vowed to do all they can to stop the measure. They’ve argued it infringes the free-speech rights of the app’s 170 million monthly U.S. users and plan to file suits to void the law or at least delay its enforcement.
“We’ll continue to fight,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, said in a memo to U.S. staff this past week. “This is the beginning, not the end of this long process.”
Biden’s signature will cap years of scrutiny in Washington, where regulators and lawmakers from both parties have voiced increased concern that TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses a risk to U.S. national security. Proponents of the bill claim that China’s government uses TikTok as a propaganda tool and could demand that ByteDance share U.S. users’ data—allegations the company and officials in Beijing have denied.