Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. He is going to introduce a bill to implement a nationwide ban on the social media app TikTok.
TikTok is China's backdoor into Americans' lives. Hawley tweeted Tuesday morning that it was a threat to our children's privacy as well as their mental health. Congress banned it on all government devices last month. I plan to introduce legislation that will ban it nationwide. Hawley, a longtime critic of TikTok, who is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has previously accused the app of posing a major security risk to the United States. He was the chief author of the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, which was enacted last year and prohibits the use of TikTok on government-issued devices.
A standalone version of Hawley's bill to ban TikTok on government devices passed the Senate with bipartisan support in December after revelations from FBI Director Christopher Wray that Chinese officials are able to manipulate content and use if for influence operations. SOUNDS ALARM TikTok is a Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist Party. It is a major security risk to the United States, and until it is forced to sever ties with China completely, it has no place on government devices, Hawley said at the time. The U.S. is banning TikTok on government devices. It's time for Joe Biden and the Democrats to do the same. Sen. Hawley's call for a total ban on TikTok takes a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy, and online harms, said Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesman for TikTok.
Oberwetter said that he hopes that he will focus his energies on efforts to address those issues holistically rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve all of the problems he's concerned about or make Americans safer.
In December, TikTok slammed Congress and the Biden administration after Hawley's bill passed the Senate.
It is troubling that some members of Congress have decided to push for politically motivated bans that will no longer advance the national security of the United States, rather than encourage the administration to complete its national security review of TikTok, rather than encourage it to conclude its national security review of TikTok, a TikTok spokeswoman said.
Biden administration officials, including Wray and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have warned Congress that the video sharing app poses legitimate national security concerns. Wray testified to the Homeland Security Committee that it is possible that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users, or to control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they choose, or to control software on millions of devices, which could potentially compromise personal devices. Several governors in a number of states, including South Dakota, Virginia, New Hampshire, Texas and Georgia, have also banned TikTok from government devices.