The U.S. Senate blocked a bill banning TikTok Wednesday after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) tried to force a vote on the issue.
On Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley began to push forward a vote on a bill that he had introduced to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok app.
Only one senator is needed to block a bill when a vote is forced, which made the likelihood of Hawley’s success marginal.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said banning the app would violate the constitution, AP News reported.
“I despise these people, but I’m not going to vote to ban them,” Paul said via AP News. “We don’t ban things that are unpopular in the United States.”
Hawley was pushing for the vote at the same time other Republicans in the senate were planning to push through their own legislation on the app, the Washington Examiner reported.
The bill, called the “No TikTok on United States Devices Act,” was first introduced by Hawley in January. The senator from Missouri wants to see a nationwide ban on the app, which is popular for its short-form videos, because of perceived risks to national security. Most lawmakers who support a ban agree that the app is a national security issue because of the Chinese government’s laws on user data being shared with them.
Democrats in the senate said that because of the app’s popularity among youth, supporting such a ban would be politically unwise.
Some politicians even have TikTok platforms, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Jeff Jackson (D-NC).
Other countries have chosen to pursue their own nationwide TikTok bans or restrict the use of the app on government devices, as previously reported by The Dallas Express. Some of those countries include Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Australia, Taiwan, and Canada.
The Biden Administration issued the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, an ultimatum last week, saying that it either had to sell its stake in the U.S. business or face a potential ban, reported The Dallas Express.