Republicans in the House and Senate have proposed legislation that would ban TikTok on all devices in the country and forbid any dealings with ByteDance, the app’s Chinese parent firm, on the grounds that it poses a serious danger to national security.
The “No TikTok on United States Devices Act” was presented on Wednesday by Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Ken Buck in an effort to include earlier legislation that already prohibits the app from some federal computers.
“All Americans who use the TikTok app on their smartphones are at risk. Through aggressive data gathering, it gives the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ keystrokes, location, and private information, according to Hawley. In order to safeguard the American people, it is now necessary to outlaw it completely. “Banning it on government equipment was a step in the right direction.”
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which permits the White House to interfere in business during a national emergency, would be invoked under the measure. Under the proposed legislation, US companies who continue to do business with ByteDance would be liable to fines.
The bill was criticized by Brooke Oberwetter, a representative for TikTok, who claimed it “takes a fragmented approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry concerns like data security, privacy, and online hazards.”
The representative said, “We hope that [Hawley] would concentrate his efforts on attempts to address those concerns holistically, rather than claiming that banning a particular service would solve any of the problems he’s concerned about or make Americans any safer.
Despite Hawley’s claims to the press on Capitol Hill that his proposal “particularly goes after TikTok” and “bans it,” the bill’s text does not appear to include any provisions preventing the app from being used on American devices. How such a restriction would be put into effect is unknown.
Transactions with ByteDance and other TikTok-affiliated companies are now prohibited, and the new measure also mandates that the US intelligence agency create a report on the supposed “national security danger presented by TikTok.” The focus of the investigation would be on whether the Chinese government might use the app to obtain US data, particularly for “intelligence or military reasons,” and it would describe any “ongoing attempts” made by Beijing to track or influence American individuals online.
Hawley is the leader of a group of senators, primarily Republicans, who have been harshly critical of TikTok and its Chinese parent company. The senator previously referred to the app as “China’s backdoor into Americans’ life.” He was the driving force behind the bipartisan campaign to restrict TikTok use on some government-owned devices late last year, but he claims the proposal did not go far enough.
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