WASHINGTON — Two US senators said they hope TikTok will remain in business in the US under a new owner as the chamber prepared to vote on Tuesday (April 23)on legislation requiring Chinese owner ByteDance to divest the popular short video app's US assets.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, a Democrat, said lawmakers recognised that the short video app is used by 170 million Americans, especially young people.

"To those young Americans, I want to say, we hear your concern and we hope that TikTok will continue under new ownership — American or otherwise... from Britain, Canada, Brazil France. It just needs to be no longer controlled by an adversary."

Driven by concerns that China could access Americans' data or surveil them with the app, the US House of Representatives passed bipartisan legislation on Saturday that would give ByteDance nine months to divest TikTok with a possible three-month extension.

If the legislation is approved by the Senate, President Joe Biden has said he would sign it into law. The company has said it would challenge the order in court.

TikTok, which says it has not shared and would not share US user data with the Chinese government, has argued the law amounts to a ban that would violate the US free speech rights of its users.

Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell said Congress is not acting to punish ByteDance or TikTok but "to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, malign operations, harming vulnerable Americans".

She said the timeline was reasonable. "This is not a new concept to require Chinese divestment from US companies," Ms Cantwell said. "We are giving people a choice here to improve this platform."

But Democratic Senator Ed Markey said ByteDance was unlikely to be able to execute a divestment that maintains the app for US users. "We should be very clear about the likely outcome of this law. It's really just a TikTok ban," he said.

"Censorship is not who we are as a people. We should not downplay or deny this trade-off." REUTERS