The White House welcomed a bill on Tuesday allowing the administration in the United States to ban Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok, said US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in a statement.
The bill was supported by the Democratic party’s senior US senator Mark Warner and South Dakota Republican’s John Thune, in an act of political entente by the lawmakers.
“We applaud the bipartisan group of senators, led by Senators Warner and Thune, who today introduced the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act,” said Sullivan.
The bipartisan bill “would empower the United States government to prevent certain foreign governments from exploiting technology services… in a way that poses risks to Americans’ sensitive data and our national security,” he added in a statement.
“Today, the threat that everyone is talking about is TikTok, and how it could enable surveillance by the Chinese Communist Party, or facilitate the spread of malign influence campaigns in the US,” said Senator Warner in a statement.
“Before TikTok, however, it was Huawei and ZTE, which threatened our nation’s telecommunications networks. And before that, it was Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, which threatened the security of government and corporate devices,” he added.
Chinese firm ByteDance owns TikTok which has more than a billion users across the world, which includes over 100 million in the US.
WATCH | TikTok in the US: TikTok’s attempts to reassure government, security concerns surrounding the app
Reacting to the bill, TikTok pointed to its months-long negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is a government agency that understands the foreign investments’ risk to US national security.
“The Biden Administration does not need additional authority from Congress to address national security concerns about TikTok: It can approve the deal negotiated with CFIUS over two years that it has spent the last six months reviewing,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said.
(With inputs from agencies)
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