TikTok: U.S. Introduce Bills to Ban App

 Concerns about national security have led some U.S. lawmakers to call for a ban on the social media app TikTok, known for its short viral videos.

The bill is the latest thing the U.S. government has done against the company owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance.

Last month, the head of the FBI said he was worried that China could use the app to change people’s minds or take control of their devices. Because of this, it is not allowed on government devices in several U.S. states.

But the bill has a hard time passing.

TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the U.S., said that the measure was a politically-motivated ban that won’t help with U.S. national security.

As part of the national security review that started when Donald Trump was president, the company said it was making plans “that we are well on our way to implementing” to make the platform in the U.S. even safer.

Congress officially introduced a bill to ban TikTok in the U.S. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is leading the charge to ban the app.

In a press release about the bill, Rubio’s office said that the Chinese communist government could use TikTok to spy on Americans. Since the beginning, TikTok has been a political football because it is owned and run by Chinese internet giant ByteDance. The app has over a billion users and is used for short-form video entertainment.

This bill would make it illegal to do business with any social media company in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, or one controlled by one of those countries. In addition, representatives Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a similar bill.

The ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act tells the U.S. president to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to “block all transactions in all property and interests in property” in the U.S. by any social media company based in China or one of the other countries seen as hostile to American interests.

In a statement, Hilary McQuaide, a spokesperson for TikTok, said, “It’s troubling that some members of Congress have decided to push for a politically motivated ban that will do nothing to improve the national security of the United States.”

McQuaide said that millions of Americans love TikTok and use it to learn, grow their businesses, and connect with creative content that makes them happy. “We will keep informing members of Congress about plans to make our platform in the United States even more secure. These plans were made with the help of our country’s top national security agencies, and we are well on putting them into action.”

Mobile data and analytics company data.ai says that from January to November 2022, TikTok had 111 million average monthly active users in the U.S. This was 22% more than last year (formerly App Annie).

Rep. Gallagher has called TikTok “digital fentanyl that’s getting Americans hooked.” He has also said that the app not only gathers a lot of information about U.S. citizens but also censors news. “Allowing the app to keep running in the U.S. would be like letting the U.S.S.R. buy up the New York Times, the Washington Post, and major broadcast networks during the Cold War,” he said.

American politicians last tried to ban TikTok a while ago

In the last few months of his presidency, Donald Trump signed an order that said TikTok would be banned in the U.S. if ByteDance didn’t sell a controlling stake in the app to American investors. However, Trump’s order was stopped by U.S. federal courts. In June 2021, Trump’s executive orders to ban TikTok were officially revoked by President Biden. He also started investigating apps that have ties to “foreign adversaries” and may pose security or privacy risks.

Nine GOP senators worried again about TikTok’s ties to China this summer. They sent TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew a letter “demanding answers on how Beijing gets access to TikTok’s backdoor data.” BuzzFeed News said on June 17 that TikTok employees in China have “repeatedly” looked at the data of U.S. users. This made the company do what it did. Chew told the GOP senators that the fact that TikTok gave staffers in China access to data about U.S. users was part of a plan to stop that access. To make “substantial progress toward compliance with a final agreement with the U.S. Government that will fully protect user data and U.S. national security interests.”

Read Also: TikTok staff in Cina can access UK user data

Separately, 15 Republican state attorneys general sent letters to the CEOs of Apple and Google on Tuesday, asking them to change TikTok’s rating in their app stores to “mature” or “17 and older” because it has adult content. Google Play gives TikTok a “teen” rating, while Apple’s App Store says users must be at least 12 years old to use it. TikTok said this summer that it was putting in place a way to mark videos with “obviously mature themes.”

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, who was one of the people who signed the letters to Apple and Google, filed two lawsuits against TikTok last week. The lawsuits claim that the company lied when it told users that their data would not be shared with the Chinese government and when it said the app’s content was appropriate for all ages.