- Meta has often referred to TikTok as a competitor
- Only a “25 per cent chance” of TikTok being banned, says analyst
Last week, the bill to either ban or force the sale of TikTok passed the House of Representatives, with hundreds of millions of users up for grabs if the Senate backs the plan. This is the latest in a game of "high stakes poker" between China and the US, said one analyst.
If the bill becomes law, then TikTok’s owner, Bytedance, would have six months to divest its US TikTok operations to a non-Chinese entity. If Apple (US:AAPL) or Google continued to sell the TikTok app through their app stores they would face massive fines. Bytedance could sell it to an American company, but it is unlikely that China would allow the algorithm that makes the app so popular fall into US hands.