Social media platform TikTok’s existential crisis in the US was plunged to new depths on Tuesday when the US Senate voted in favour of legislation that would ban the app if parent company ByteDance fails to divest the business.

The legislation, which was voted for by a wide margin in the Senate, was passed by the House on Saturday and president Joe Biden has indicated that he will vote it into law as soon as Wednesday.

While previously being mooted as its own piece of legislation, lawmakers several weeks ago attached the ban as a measure to a bill which provides $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Despite continued protests from the company to the contrary, US lawmakers have spent years stoking fears that China could have access to US user data or surveil American citizens.

Former president Donald Trump also threatened to ban the app unless it divested its US business, leading ByteDance to agree a deal with Microsoft – but this was never followed through on.

Senator Marco Rubio, a former rival to Trump in the 2016 presidential race, said that allowing the “Chinese Communist party to control one of the most popular apps in America … was dangerously shortsighted” and described the ban on the platform used by 170 million Americans as “a good move” for the country.

TikTok will challenge the bill on First Amendment grounds, and it is expected that a lawsuit will come from US-based TikTok users. Both parties will use a US judge in Montana’s block of a ban on free speech grounds as precedent.

In an internal email seen by Reuters, TikTok told staff that the law “is the beginning, not the end of this long process," and said that it would move quickly to defend itself.

Should the ban be realised, ByteDance will have nine months to sell off TikTok. If the company fails to do so, then app store operators like Apple and Google would and web hosting companies could face fines for continuing to offer access. A three-month extension is possible if there are signs of a deal progressing.

The bill provides broad powers for the White House to ban or force the sale of other foreign-owned apps – a measure which Democratic senator Ron Wyden said “could be abused by a future administration to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights."

Democratic Senator Ed Markey echoed these sentiments, adding: "Censorship is not who we are as a people. We should not downplay or deny this trade-off."

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