WASHINGTON, April 23 (Reuters) - Two U.S. senators said

they hope TikTok will remain in business in the U.S. under a new

owner as the chamber prepared to vote on Tuesday on legislation

requiring Chinese owner ByteDance to divest the popular short

video app's U.S. assets.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, a Democrat,

said lawmakers recognized 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 U.S. 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

U.S. user data with the Chinese government, has argued the law

amounts to a ban that would violate the U.S. 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 U.S. companies,"

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

U.S. 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."