Washington is robbing ByteDance blind in the latest controversy of banning TikTok in the US if the Chinese owner does not sell his whole business to a U.S. entity in fear of leaking national security to Beijing.
Former US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been reportedly building a group of investors to buy TikTok after the House of Representatives passed a bill which forced the short-video application to divest the company or else be banned from the country.
Mnuchin expressed his opinion via CNBC that the bill should be passed and sold, since it would be a great business, while also stating that the application should be owned by the US, not China, as the world’s second largest economy would not allow any US-owned company to operate in its country.
On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill, which would lead to a TikTok ban if ByteDance, its Chinese owner, did not divest the US assets of the short-video application within six months, as concerns were raised over a critical national security issue.
The bill was approved in a bipartisan vote of 352–65 and passed on to the Senate.
Meanwhile, though the majority of the representatives agreed with the bill and urged the Senate to swiftly take action, some were uncertain about the matter as they raised questions about serious antitrust and privacy concerns.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew stated in a video, which was posted after the bill was passed, that the bill would take millions of dollars away from creators and small businesses, while also adding that the company would exercise its legal rights to counteract and prevent the ban.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry also criticized the US legislation as being persistent toward TikTok, even though it had never found any evidence indicating that the platform was a threat to its national security.
Meanwhile, there were no specific details on who the other investors would be in the group that Steven Mnuchin was building. However, the divestment of TikTok also sparked interest in other buyers, such as Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, according to the data from the Wall Street Journal reported by CNBC.
TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance that is based outside China. The company said that it would take a necessary step to veto this action by US lawmakers.
Since the release of TikTok in 2016, the platform never positioned itself to serve its service for Chinese markets, as it was banned in mainland China and pulled out of Hong Kong in 2020. The company aimed to win customers and trust in the United States and other Western countries, as well as reassuring that the data from users would not be accessible by ByteDance employees in Beijing.
