US Lawmakers Announce Bipartisan Plan to Ban TikTok

Republican Senator Marco Rubio on Tuesday introduced bipartisan laws to ban China’s common social media app TikTok, ratcheting up strain on proprietor ByteDance amid US fears the app may very well be used to spy on Americans and censor content material.

The laws would block all transactions from any social media firm in or beneath the affect of China and Russia, Rubio’s workplace mentioned in a information launch, including {that a} companion invoice within the US House of Representatives was sponsored by Republican congressman Mike Gallagher and Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi.

“It is troubling that rather than encouraging the administration to conclude its national security review of TikTok, some members of Congress have decided to push for a politically-motivated ban that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States,” a TikTok spokesperson mentioned in a press release, including that the corporate would proceed to temporary members of Congress on the plans which can be “well underway” to “further secure our platform in the United States.”

The invoice comes as scrutiny of TikTok has grown in Washington in latest weeks, after a failed bid by the Trump administration to ban the video-sharing app.

At a listening to final month, FBI Director Chris Wray mentioned TikTok’s US operations increase nationwide safety issues, flagging the danger that the Chinese authorities might harness it to affect customers or management their units.

Alabama and Utah on Monday joined different US states prohibiting the usage of TikTok on state authorities units and pc networks as a result of nationwide safety issues.

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump tried to dam new customers from downloading TikTok and ban different transactions that might have successfully blocked the apps’ use within the United States however misplaced a sequence of courtroom battles over the measure.

The US authorities’s Committee on Foreign Investment within the United States (CFIUS), a robust nationwide safety physique, in 2020 ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok due to fears that US person information may very well be handed on to China’s communist authorities.

CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks for months aiming to succeed in a nationwide safety settlement to guard the information of TikTok’s greater than 100 million customers.

© Thomson Reuters 2022