By Lauren Feiner , a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering

TikTok ‘ban’ passes in the House again, moving to the Senate in foreign aid package

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2024-04-22 11:00:04

By Lauren Feiner , a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.

The House once again passed a bill that could ban TikTok from the US unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance divests it — but this time, it’s in a way that will be harder for the Senate to stall.

The bill passed 360-58 as part of a larger bill related to sanctions on foreign adversaries like Russia. It’s part of a package of foreign aid bills that seek to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid to Gaza. Due to the urgency of the funds, packaging the TikTok bill with these measures means that the Senate will need to consider the proposal more swiftly that it would as a standalone bill. The earlier TikTok bill, which passed the House 352-65 just last month, has so far lingered in the Senate, with lawmakers there giving mixed messages about its future.

Notably, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA), whose committee would normally take up the bill before it proceeds to the floor, had remained noncommittal about it. But after the version in the foreign aid package was released, she said she supported the legislation.