Is the US really preparing to ban TikTok?

The House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a total ban in the United States.

The legislation now moves to the Senate, where its likelihood of passing is uncertain. But with a landslide of support in the House – 352 Congress members voted in favor of the bill and only 65 voted against – it’s clear that TikTok is facing its biggest existential threat yet in the US.

Here’s what you need to know about the bill, how likely TikTok is to be banned, and what that means for the platform’s 170 million US users.

The bill that passed in the House on Wednesday is the latest salvo in an ongoing political battle over the platform, which exploded in popularity after its emergence in 2017. It quickly surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in downloads in 2018 and reported a 45% increase in monthly active users between July 2020 and July 2022.

The platform’s meteoric rise alarmed some lawmakers, who believe that TikTok’s China-based parent company could collect sensitive user data and censor content that goes against the Chinese government.

TikTok has repeatedly stated it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government, but lawmakers’ concerns were exacerbated by news investigations that showed China-based employees at ByteDance had accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users.

TikTok has argued that US user data is not held in China but in Singapore and in the US, where it is routed through cloud infrastructure operated by Oracle, an American company. In 2023, TikTok opened a data center in Ireland where it handles EU citizen data.

These measures have not been sufficient for many US lawmakers, and in March 2023 the