According to a number of domestic and foreign media reports, the U.S. Senate, by an overwhelming majority of 79 to 18, passed the "TikTok Divestment Act", the core content of the bill is one sentence, TikTok must be separated from the parent company and resold to the United States, otherwise it will be banned from the United States. U.S. President Joe Biden said that as soon as the bill is submitted to the White House, he will sign it immediately, and it was a misunderstanding to register TikTok to canvass votes before.
On the 24th local time, the U.S. Senate voted to pass a proposal to force the popular short video platform TikTok to divest its parent company ByteDance
Although the US side came up with a bunch of high-sounding reasons such as "illegal data collection" and "endangering national security", in the final analysis, it is the US government that cannot accept that there are public opinion platforms that are not regulated or monitored.
Especially since the outbreak of the current round of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, several public opinion platforms in the "mainstream" of the United States have "controlled" the pro-Palestinian speech and the picture and video content of the Gaza front line to avoid causing dissatisfaction among the Jewish community, but there are no such restrictions on TikTok, and a large amount of real information inside Gaza has been exposed to everyone, which has objectively promoted the wave of support for Palestinians in the United States.
ikTok's situation is becoming more and more dangerous
When the US House of Representatives passed the bill before, some analysts pointed out that the lobbying of congressmen by Jewish interest groups played a key role. Coincidentally, in the past two days, a large number of students who support Palestine at Columbia, Harvard, and many other universities have been arrested and imprisoned by the police, and the "freedom of speech", "open and inclusive campus", and "academic spirit" advocated by the United States all day long do not seem to be taken seriously.
As for "illegal data collection", it is even more coincidental. Four days ago, in the early hours of April 20, the Senate passed a bill 60-34 to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, stuck on the deadline. The bill was quickly sent to the White House and signed by Biden as soon as possible, and many U.S. officials expressed relief that we had finally secured U.S. national security.
The infamous "Section 702" is a huge irony of American-style democracy
What is the origin of this Section 702? Its core content is to allow US intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance on "potential targets" without the permission of the courts, and collect the content of their phone calls, text messages, and Internet communications. The American people generally refer to this provision as the "Surveillance Act". In the past few years, there have been many media exposures that US intelligence agencies are spying on the phone calls of leaders of European countries, and its legal basis is this 702 article. Even the phone calls of the current UN Secretary-General António Guterres and other UN officials have been monitored by US intelligence.
Subsequently, the New York Times, the most "mainstream" media in the United States, wrote an eloquent article with a headline: Government surveillance protects our security. In this context, what qualifications does the U.S. government have to accuse TikTok of illegally collecting data? Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University and a well-known economist, said that the "TikTok stripping bill" is a naked incitement to hatred, because every American knows that the most likely to spy on them is the U.S. government.
Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University and a well-known economist
Of course, the U.S. Congress has such power, hundreds of congressmen privately collude, come up with a "pork bucket bill" to vote, you can introduce a law that can be used for long-arm jurisdiction over other countries, you don't care whether the law itself is right or wrong, in short, in the subsequent implementation process, the powerful institutions of the United States will only tell you, the United States, "do things according to law", and then put a layer of gold on ourselves. As for how TikTok will respond, they have already said that they will use all legal means to deal with this crisis, sell it to American companies, and dream about it.