The US Senate has passed a bill to ban the popular social media platform TikTok unless it is sold by its China-based owners.

The social media platform TikTok has found itself in the news a great deal of late, and not for good reasons. Last year a number of governments, including those of Australia and the UK, banned the use of TikTok on government phones.

In November 2023, the government of Nepal banned TikTok to “protect Nepal’s population from harmful content”. In December 2023, the UK government’s regulator Ofcom investigated TikTok over parental control concerns.

Now, the US Senate has voted in favour of passing a bill to ban TikTok in the country if China-based parent company ByteDance does not sell it.

The bill will now be sent to US President Joe Biden, who has previously said he would sign the legislation.

The new law gives ByteDance a year to sell TikTok to a US-based company, or the app will face a total ban from American app stores.

According to an article in The Guardian, the...