TikTok will be banned by law in the United States
Photo: By Klauss
The United States took a significant step on Tuesday toward a ban on the wildly popular TikTok app through a bill backed by the White House, amid growing Western mistrust of the Chinese social network. The US National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, stated in a statement that he “welcomes” a legislative proposal presented on the same day, which would allow, among other things, the banning of applications such as TikTok. This bill, advanced by a Democratic senator and a Republican senator, “would allow the US state to prevent certain foreign states from exploiting technology services (…) in a way that threatens the confidential data of Americans and our national security”, he wrote the White House adviser.
Many elected officials consider the platform of short and viral videos, which belongs to the Chinese group ByteDance, a threat to national security. They fear, along with a growing number of Western governments, that Beijing could access user data around the world through the app, which TikTok has denied for years. “It is widely accepted that TikTok represents a threat to our national security,” argued on Tuesday the influential Republican Senator John Thune, who presented the legislative proposal. Specifically, the text of the law, called the ‘Restrict Act’, gives the Minister of Commerce new powers to prohibit the application. A bill on the same topic, filed in the House of Representatives, also passed a key stage in Congress last week. Banning the application would be equivalent to “putting a muzzle on the freedom of expression” of millions of Americans, protests TikTok, which claims over a hundred million users in the US. The application has already surpassed YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in terms of “time spent” by American adults and is now overtaking Netflix. At the end of February, the White House had already ordered federal agencies to ensure that TikTok disappears from their smartphones within 30 days, implementing a law ratified in early January by President Joe Biden.
By Sara Colin
