The U.S senate late on Wednesday passed by voice vote a bill to bar federal employees from using the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok on government-owned devices.
The bill must be approved by the US House of Representatives before going to president joe Biden for approval. The house of representatives would wish to pass the senate bill before the current lawmakers’ session ends, which is predicted next week.
The vote is the latest action on the part of US lawmakers to throttle Chinese corporations amid national security fears that Beijing might use them to spy on Americans.
The Senate action comes into action after North Dakota and Iowa this week joined a growing number of states in banning TikTok from government devices amid concerns that could be passed on to the Chinese government.
During the last congress, the senate in august 2020 approved legislation to bar TikTok from government devices. The bill’s sponsor was reintroduced in legislation in 2021.
Tiktok has said the concern is largely fueled by misinformation and is happy to meet with policymakers to discuss the company’s practices. Other states taking similar action include Texas, Maryland, and South Dakota.
In 2020, then-president Donald Trump tried to dam new users from downloading TikTok and ban alternative transactions that might have effectively blocked the app’s use within the U.S. however lost a series of court battles over the measure.
Impacting Influencers
A ban on TikTok within the U.S. would forthwith modify however influencers and content creators operate because it would take away what has become one of the foremost widespread platforms. However, TikTok is much of the sole platform where influencers and alternative creators post content.
Tiktok also essentially changed the game in terms of how much and how effective short-form content is delivered to users and it has become so effective that it forced every other major social media platform to create a competing feature
If the platform is actually banned there will likely be a massive adverse reaction, mainly from content creators and companies that have spent upward of thousands of hours building their audiences.
However, that could mean very little to government officials who are concerned about privacy and security issues.
TikTok Alternatives
In many ways, it might be argued that TikTok is simply the flavor of the day. It wasn’t the primary social media platform and it certainly will not be the last. If it is banned, this could provide opportunities for other services to step up or for a new one to emerge.
One could possibly be the tik-tok alternative is decentralized social media.