US Senate passes bill to force sale of TikTok, sending it to Biden
Al Jazeera
TikTok has said legislation ‘would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans’.
The United States Senate has approved legislation that would ban the popular video-sharing app TikTok unless it divests from its Chinese parent company.
The vote on Tuesday clears the way for the bill to be signed into law by President Joe Biden, who has backed the measures, although the legislation is expected to be challenged in the courts.
The proposal, which would give Chinese company ByteDance nine months to sell the platform, was included in a larger $95bn package that provides foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel.
The Senate voted 79-18 to approve the package, after Republicans in the House of Representatives last week attached the TikTok bill to the foreign aid proposals to help expedite its passage through Congress.
The House passed the package on Saturday in a 360-58 bipartisan vote.
