TikTok said the bill would “trample on the free speech rights of 170 million Americans.”
The U.S. Senate has approved a bill that would ban popular video-sharing app TikTok unless it is divested from its Chinese parent company.
Tuesday's vote cleared the way for the bill to be signed into law by President Joe Biden, who has supported the bill, but the bill is expected to be challenged in court.
The proposal, which would give Chinese company ByteDance nine months to sell the platform, was included in a larger package of $95 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel.
The Senate approved the package by a vote of 79-18 after House Republicans attached the TikTok bill to their foreign aid proposal last week to expedite its passage.
The House passed the bill on a bipartisan vote of 360-58 on Saturday.
Both Republicans and Democrats have argued that TikTok threatens national security and that the platform could be used by the Chinese government to spy on Americans and manipulate public debate. ing.
TikTok insists it does not and will not share any data about its U.S. users with the Chinese government.
The vote came just days after the U.S. Congress approved reauthorization of a controversial program that allows surveillance of Americans' communications without a judicial warrant.
TikTok said in a statement Sunday that the bill forcing the sale would “trample on the free speech rights of 170 million Americans.”
TikTok is expected to seek a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the law pending a challenge to its constitutionality.
Last year, a judge in the U.S. state of Montana blocked a similar ban, ruling that it “exceeded state power” and “may violate the First Amendment.”
Human rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, also oppose the proposal on free speech grounds.
A similar bill to force a sale of TikTok passed the House last month but was held up in the Senate.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning TikTok, but the move was blocked in court on the grounds that it violated free speech and due process rights.