Will TikTok still exist in America?

LISTEN CLOSELY and you can hear the influencers wail. On March 13th America’s House of Representatives passed a bill barring app stores and internet providers from distributing “foreign-adversary-controlled applications”. The target is clear: TikTok, a hit short-video app to which 170m Americans are glued for an average of 56 minutes a day.TikTok’s position in America . Although the firm is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, it is a subsidiary of ByteDance, a Chinese tech darling. That has fed bipartisan fears that the Chinese government could use it to spy on American citizens or shape public opinion. TikTok has denied that the Chinese government wields any influence over it, and has sought to assuage concerns by enlisting Oracle, an American software giant, to fence off the data of American users into local servers and inspect its source code. It points out that American investors, such as Carlyle and General Atlantic, are among ByteDance’s biggest shareholders.