Today, we have a YNH Exclusive on the new bill just passed by the United States Congress!
Contents:
United States President Joe Biden has signed a huge bill into law which includes foreign aid, Russian sanctions, and a part that could end up leading to a ban on TikTok. Here are the parts of the new bill:
Part 1: This section includes $60.8 billion in aid for Ukraine in their war. 23.2 of those 60.8 billion are solely for new weapons to be sent to Ukraine.
Part 2: This section includes $26.4 billion in aid for Israel for their war against Hamas and increasing their defense capabilities in case of more Iranian attacks. Out of those original $26.4 billion, $4 billion are for their Iron Dome defense system, but a lot of it is also meant for humanitarian aid to save the suffering citizens of Gaza.
Part 3: This final foreign aid section includes $8.1 billion for Taiwan to prepare their military for possible incoming Chinese attacks in the near future, as China has hinted at. It will also be put toward new patrols to prevent China from trying to assert control the South and East China Seas.
Part 4: This part is highly controversial, as it contains a huge threat to popular social media app TikTok. Firstly, this section also includes sanctions on multiple Russian holdings. More importantly, the bill states that TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has nine months to sell the company before a ban takes effect. Concerns in the US government have arisen in the past few months over the Chinese origins of TikTok and whether China could be spying on citizens of the US using the app, leading to the introduction of this section to the House as a standalone bill earlier this year.
In total, the bill is sort of a compound bill, as four different bills were merged together and edited to create one large bill that would pass through the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Just hours after the bill was signed into effect by President Joe Biden, aid was already on its way to Ukraine and Israel, but the fourth part of the bill faces some obstacles before it gets to its final destination.
TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users (out of the 5.3 billion people in the world that regularly use the internet), almost 50% of the American population uses TikTok, and the average American spends an hour a day on TikTok. It is even expected to pass Facebook, one of its longtime competitors, in terms of usage by 2025. It is now the 6th-largest social media network in the world with 1.218 billion users, behind Facebook (3.03 billion), YouTube (2.491 billion), WhatsApp (2 billion), Instagram (1.5 billion), and WeChat (1.327 billion). There is an upside to TikTok, though (from an economical perspective). Over 7 million small businesses use TikTok for advertising, and the app supports over 224,000 jobs in the US. Due to all of this, banning TikTok would be a huge move that could drastically affect the lives of many Americans.
This section of the bill is sure to face legal challenges in the near future, with people (and TikTok themselves) possibly even taking cases to the Supreme Court as they fight the law. Not many companies have the funds to buy TikTok, as its purchase would come with a large price tag -- its parent company is valued at $225 billion -- meaning that a ban would be in its future. The company and the citizens fighting the law are most likely to use the 1st Amendment to contradict the bill, stating that it would be a violation of their free speech. The entire purchase process would be a large mess, which lawyers will figure out in court when the time comes.
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