White House backs TikTok ban bill

The White House has announced its support for a new bipartisan bill that allows the US Commerce Secretary to ban foreign-owned technology like TikTok. The announcement came Tuesday as a group of eight senators from both parties was introducing the bill.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a sentence that the Biden administration supported the “urgent” approval of the new Senate Bill to “Restrict the Emergence of Security Threats that Put Information and Communications Technology at Risk,” or the RESTRICT Act, which would grant the executive branch the authority legal to ban TikTok.

Such a bill, Sullivan said, would “empower the United States government to prevent certain foreign governments from exploiting technology services that operate in the United States in a manner that poses risks to Americans’ confidential data and our national security.” .

Speaking during the press conference to introduce the bill, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. and chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said the RESTRICT Act would not just target TikTok.

“Everyone is talking about TikTok and the ability of that platform to be used by the Communist Party both for data collection, and potentially as an evil influence and propaganda tool,” Warner said.

“But before TikTok, there was Huawei and ZTE, and before that, there was Russia’s Kaspersky Labs. So what we are trying to address here is the risk of insecure information and communication technologies,” he said.

He also stressed that the bill, if passed, would introduce a “rules-based process” for evaluating foreign-owned technology, and that the commerce secretary would be given less severe tools than bans.

The Senate bill is the latest in a series of bills aimed at banning TikTok, and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, recently introduced his own bill last week. Democrats objected.

squash a mole

Strong White House and bipartisan support for RESTRICT in the Senate suggests it could succeed where others have failed.

The bill was also introduced Tuesday by three other Democratic senators: Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, and four Republicans: John Thune of South Dakota, Mitt Romney of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Dan Sullivan from Alaska.

Each of the senators noted that the bill wasn’t just aimed at TikTok, with some saying they wanted the bill’s rules to help authorities avoid a game of “Whack-a-Mole” with the appearance of TikTok. imitation services.

But each senator also struggled to keep their focus off of TikTok.

“The truth is, with 100 million Americans daily on TikTok, averaging 90 minutes a day, this is a problem,” Warner said after emphasizing that TikTok was not the only target of the bill. “I would imagine most of you would like your networks to get 90 minutes a day from 100 million Americans.”

Thune, who is also the minority whip in the Senate, said the bill “eliminates this Whack-a-Mole” where US authorities are forced to assess new foreign-owned technology companies month after month.

Its rules would make it clear what kinds of security issues could lead to a ban, he said, and doing so would prevent that technology from taking off.

“I have long been concerned with how each social media company uses the data it collects about users,” Thune said. “But I am particularly concerned about TikTok’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, which repeatedly, repeatedly, spies on American citizens.”

He said that “China-based employees of ByteDance (which owns TikTok) have repeatedly accessed non-public data” of US citizens “despite TikTok saying otherwise,” adding that he did not trust any company promises with headquarters in Beijing on the security of TikTok. .

“The Chinese Communist Party has shown in recent years that it is willing to lie about almost everything,” Thune said.

bipartisanship

Brooke Oberwetter, a spokeswoman for TikTok, said the executive branch already had the power to force TikTok to change its operations, noting that the social media platform was in talks with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

“The Biden Administration does not need additional authority from Congress to address national security concerns about TikTok – it can approve the two-year-brokered deal with CFIUS that it has spent the last six months reviewing,” Oberwetter told Radio Free Asia.

“We appreciate that some members of Congress remain willing to explore options to address national security concerns that do not have the effect of censoring millions of Americans,” he added. “An American ban on TikTok is a ban on exporting American culture and values ​​to the more than a billion people who use our service around the world.”

Bennet, the Colorado Democrat, said he believed the bill would pass given his bipartisan support and end what he said was 50 years of Washington’s light treatment of Beijing.

Romney, a former presidential candidate, said that bipartisanship “says that Congress has recognized that China is not our dear friend.”

Sullivan, the Alaska Republican, echoed that sentiment.

“Yes, there is a lot of dissent and partisanship here,” he said. “One area where there is very little partisanship is the recognition, in a bipartisan way, of the serious nature of the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. We are very united as senators on this issue.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster