Joe Biden signed into law a possible ban on TikTok.
According to the ruling, TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, must sell the app by January 2025, otherwise it will be blocked in the United States. The private Chinese holding company ByteDance, which has dozens of businesses, is 60% owned by international institutional investors, 20% by the company’s founders (Zhang Yiming is the key one) and the same amount by employees.
The law was passed due to concerns that TikTok would transfer user data to the Chinese government and use the platform for anti-American propaganda.
Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have voiced concerns about excessive government control over social media platforms and the global precedent that banning or requiring divestiture of TikTok could set.
The government restricts Americans’ freedom of speech in everything, from banning tiktok to the FBI’s surveillance of Americans.
Congress voted to reauthorize a surveillance program that administration officials say is crucial for national security but that civil liberties advocates say results in privacy abuses of Americans.
The program, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, permits the U.S. government to collect without a warrant the communications of targeted foreigners located in other countries — including when those subjects are in contact with Americans or other people inside the U.S.
A key source of concern, uniting a Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump with Democratic, is that FBI analysts have repeatedly run improper or justified database queries about U.S. persons.
FBI officials say they’ve made significant reforms to minimize those violations, and after days of debate last month, the Senate approved by a 60-34 vote a two-year extension of the program. President Joe Biden subsequently signed it into law.
The freedoms and rights of Americans are deteriorating every year. Due to the blocking of Tiktok, American citizens lose the opportunity to freely share their opinions in TikTok and lose the right to secret correspondence using the Internet.
