The island democracy was early to ban TikTok on government phones, and the ruling party refuses to use it. But a U.S.-style ban is not under consideration.
Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, last June. In Manhattan Thursday, he said: “We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side and that we will ultimately prevail.”
President Biden has signed the bill to force a sale of the video app or ban it. Now the law faces court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility.
TikTok supporters on Capitol Hill last month. The proposed law would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States if its Chinese owner sold it within about nine months.
Supporters of TikTok gathered near the Capitol last month as the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill to force TikTok to cut ties with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or risk being banned in U.S. app stores.
A tiny group of lawmakers huddled in private about a year ago, aiming to keep the discussions away from TikTok lobbyists while bulletproofing a bill that could ban the app.
Congressional representatives joined TikTok creators at the Capitol last year ahead of a House vote to ban the app. The Senate passed a version of the bill this week.
President Biden has signed the bill to force a sale of the video app or ban it. Now the law faces court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility.
TikTok supporters on Capitol Hill last month. The proposed law would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States if its Chinese owner sold it within about nine months.
European officials threatened to fine TikTok and force it to remove some features, the latest regulatory challenge for the Chinese-owned social media app.
Apple said it removed WhatsApp and Threads from its China app offerings Friday on Beijing’s orders, amid technological tensions between the U.S. and China.
A recently-opened Apple Store in Shanghai’s Jing’an district in March. Apple said it removed WhatsApp and Threads, which are owned by Meta, from its app store in China.
Court records, mistakenly made public, tell a story about the birth of ByteDance, its bumpy road to success and the role of the Republican megadonor Jeff Yass’s firm.
“TikTok definitely has a branding issue in the United States,” said Sister Monica Clare, a nun in Mendham, N.J., who appears in an ad for the video app.
Major U.S. investment firms such as General Atlantic, Susquehanna and Sequoia Capital own stakes in ByteDance, the parent of TikTok. Their investments are increasingly under fire.
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