"People Will Lose Their Jobs!" - TikTok Viral Star 'Spudman' On U.S Banning App Over Chinese Owners

The U.S. Senate voted by a wide margin late Tuesday in favor of legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States if its owner, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, fails to divest the popular short video app over the next nine months to a year.

Driven by widespread worries among U.S. lawmakers that China could access Americans' data or surveil them with the app, the bill was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday and U.S. President Joe Biden has said he will sign it into law on Wednesday.

"For years we've allowed the Chinese Communist party to control one of the most popular apps in America that was dangerously shortsighted," said Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. "A new law is going to require its Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good move for America."

Asked about the Senate's vote, the Chinese foreign ministry referred on Wednesday to comments the ministry made in March when the House of Representatives passed a similar bill.

At the time, the ministry criticized the legislation, arguing "though the U.S. has never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to the U.S.'s national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok."

The four-year battle over TikTok, which is used by 170 million people in the United States, is just one front in a war over the internet and technology between Washington and Beijing. Last week, Apple AAPL.O said Beijing had ordered it to remove Meta Platforms' META.O WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China over Chinese national security concerns.

TikTok star Ben Newman, also known as Spudman, says "a lot of people will lose their jobs" as a result of the U.S banning TikTok.

"It doesn't seem to make sense... my business grew by 10 times due to TikTok. I would be very worried if the UK government decided to follow."

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