Everyone in the US is enraged about The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, commonly known as the TikTok Ban Bill.

On March 12, 2024, the House of Representatives passed the bill requiring TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the social media network or risk a total ban in the US.

The proposal now heads to the Senate, where its chances of passage are unknown. However, with a landslide of support in the House, 352 Congress members voted in favor of the measure, and only 65 opposed it. Netizens fear that TikTok might be banned in the US.

Various influencers have spoken up about the bill, including American YouTuber, gamer, and live-streamer Jynxzi. He talked about the bill on the FULL SEND Podcast after it was passed by the House of Representatives.

Jynxzi on the TikTok Ban

According to his opinion, TikTok is not getting banned in the US, and the government threatening to ban it is to get TikTok out of ByteDance’s ownership.

The hosts of the podcast then discussed the financial success of the app and how many TikTokers were getting paid a lot from the app. Jynxzi then pointed out the data mining that happens from TikTok.

He noted that the app was from China and that people running the country did not like that. He mentioned that the “guys running the country” did not use the app and did not know its significance.

Instead, they did not like how China owned the app and were getting the personal information of US citizens. So, he speculated that it was the reason why the US government wanted one of its organizations to own the app — to save the data of the citizens within their country.

Jynxzi agreed that TikTok helped him gain fame. His video and streaming clips often get shared on the platform, helping him amass more fans and followers.

Jynxzi. (Source: Instagram)

At the time of writing, the app has not been banned from the US yet.

What is the TikTok Ban Bill about?

The bill enacted by the House on March 12, 2024, is the latest hit in an ongoing political dispute over the platform, which gained popularity after its launch in 2017. It swiftly surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube and has a lot of users all over the world.

The platform’s spectacular ascent has frightened some politicians, who worry TikTok’s Chinese parent corporation may acquire sensitive user data and restrict content critical of the Chinese government. 

TikTok has consistently declared that it has not and will not share US user data with the Chinese government, but legislators’ fears were heightened by press reports revealing that China-based ByteDance workers have obtained non-public data about US TikTok users. 

TikTok claims that US customer data is stored not in China but in Singapore and the United States, where it is routed through cloud infrastructure provided by Oracle, an American corporation. TikTok constructed a data center in Ireland in 2023 to handle data from EU citizens.

Many US politicians have found these precautions insufficient. In March 2023, the CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was summoned to Congress and subjected to more than five hours of intense questioning regarding these and other practices.

Several measures to monitor TikTok and its interaction with US user data have been proposed in Congress over the last year, culminating in the law enacted on March 12, 2024.

Under the new bill, ByteDance would have 165 days to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese corporation. If it did not, app stores such as the Apple App Store and Google Play would be legally prohibited from hosting TikTok or offering web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.