It's the ban heard 'round the world: the US House of Representatives passed a bill this week calling for the ban of mega-popular social media app TikTok unless it's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform.

The House passed the bill with bipartisan support and a vote tally of 5-to-1 in favor. Even President Biden signaled he would sign the bill if it clears the Senate. If so, TikTok will become the first app in history to be outright banned in the US. But can the bill pass the upper chamber?

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has noted that he would need to first discuss a bill with "relevant committee chairs" before knowing its path to a vote, writes the Associated Press.

“We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok — a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party,” Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a joint statement with Senator Marco Rubio, the ranking Republican of the committee.

But not everyone is on-board. “We don’t have only a TikTok problem—we have a Big Tech privacy problem,” Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts wrote on X. “From Meta to Amazon to Discord, US-owned companies are preying on children & teens for profit. We don’t need to ban TikTok to fix their invasive practices. Passing my COPPA 2.0 is the answer.”

And the ACLU has come out against the ban saying that it would "suppress speech, even if it doesn’t explicitly regulate content," reports The Verge. The ACLA "pointed to a federal court’s ruling in Montana blocking the state’s attempted ban of TikTok to back up its claims that the new House bill is unconstitutional."

The First Amendment

And this free speech argument is especially ripe with two cases currently before the Supreme Court.

As we previously, both Florida and Texas passed laws in their state that effectively prohibited social media platforms from banning users. These laws attempted to enshrine a freedom of speech in what those states' lawmakers consider the public square. But Chief Justice Roberts asked during oral arguments "whether our first concern should be with the state regulating what, you know, we have called the modern public square.”

THE VERDICT:

Silicon Valley seems to be facing an interesting bind: on the one hand, banning TikTok from the US would help companies like Meta and Snap gain more users and potential ad revenue. On the other hand, should the US start going down a road where media platforms can be banned outright and the First Amendment can be weaponized for political gain, we will be entering a fraught new era of the Internet.