The U-S House passed a bill on Wednesday requiring Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the platform or see TikTok face a total ban in the US. The bill now moves to The Senate for consideration.
While the legislation still faces plenty more hurdles before it becomes law, that hasn’t stopped global discourse regarding the future of the popular social media escalating, with an onslaught of phone calls overwhelming Capitol Hill offices and US investors poising themselves to buy the app should it be divested from its parent company.
Although concerns about privacy and national security are the main driving forces behind the bill, larger questions about the role TikTok plays in the lives of the estimated one-third of Americans who use the app are now being thrust into the spotlight.
It seems that many TikTok users have moved on from filming themselves dancing to music clips — in fact, only a little over half have ever posted a video — and are increasingly using it to stay informed: surveys conducted by Pew Research found that last year, 43% of TikTok’s users regularly turned to the app to get their news, up 21% from 2020, as more traditional information sources like Facebook fell out of favor.
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