The bill introduced on Tuesday would give the president the ability to force the sale of foreign-owned technologies, applications, software or e-commerce platforms if they present a national security threat to US users. It doesn’t mention Beijing-based Bytedance’s TikTok by name, but the video-sharing app, which has about 100 million users in the US, is the clear target.
At the same time, the administration wants to avoid the legal challenges that beset former president Donald Trump’s push to ban TikTok and Tencent Holdings’s WeChat messaging app. Trump ordered those products banned from app stores in 2020, but a federal judge blocked the order, arguing that it would violate free speech rights.
It was unclear how the bill introduced by Warner and John Thune, the Senate’s No 2 Republican, might affect a separate national-security review of TikTok. That review, led by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, or Cfius, was meant to come to an agreement addressing concerns surrounding US user data. But that process appears to have stalled.
The backlash has had TikTok waging an all-out charm offensive globally for months. To drum up goodwill and defend its data protection and content moderation policies in Washington, executives have enlisted lobbyists to engage with more than 100 congressional offices. In the second quarter of last year, TikTok spent $2.1-million on lobbying on issues including children’s privacy, content moderation and antitrust – the most to date.
Well if you want the Chinese communist party knowing everything about you and having unprecedented power to influence your society thru social engineering, then by all means, carry on! If not, ban the motherfucker now!
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