US Senate to pass TikTok ban stuffed into Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel support package as early as Tuesday

United States House legislators have passed a support package consisting of four bills to provide over $94 billion to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. One bill called the ‘‘21st Century Peace through Strength Act’’ incorporates the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” that separately passed the House Wednesday to force ByteDance to divest TikTok or leave the U.S. market. Stuffing the ban into a package with broad partisan support makes rejection less likely.

Hackers and groups related to China have increasingly threated U.S. elections and attacked American infrastructure. For example, Chinese military-backed hackers broke into credit reporting company Equifax in 2017 to steal the identity information for 150 million Americans, giving China access to financial and private data of victims.

Critically, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in its 2024 Annual Threat Assessment report found that “TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.” Russian, Iran, and other anti-American countries have also been actively seeking to interfere with U.S. elections.

Congress has been working on a TikTok ban to counter allegations that its owner ByteDance allegedly provides the communist Chinese government full access to user data. The prior attempt at passing a ban stalled in the Senate, but this package appears ready to pass on Tuesday, the earliest that senators can vote. President Biden has said he supports the ban. China has already pushed back by forcing the removal of Signal, Telegram, Threads, and WhatsApp from the Apple iOS app store a day ago.

The bill provides 270 days for ByteDance to act, so TikTok users making significant income from the app should prepare for service disruptions or account closures. Readers who are making money from TikTok for a living should consider backing up their videos and data (to a storage device like this at Amazon). ByteDance has already said it will not sell its proprietary algorithms that make the service unique, so sale of TikTok will result in a neutered app.

The bill also includes the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024, which prevents any data broker from transmitting personal information of Americans to foreign adversaries. This effectively requires TikTok to house all of its American user information in America (or a friendly country) after moving it from China where the communist government has full access. Migrating the data of hundreds of millions of American users can result in loss or other issues.