The pressure against TikTok increased in the United States this Tuesday with the advance in Congress of a bill that could lead to the ban of the popular application, a day after the White House vetoed it from the cell phones of officials.
According to a spokesperson for the app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok considers that this prohibition is “political theater”, and regrets that “this approach is replicated by other governments around the world”.
On Monday night, the White House ordered federal institutions to ensure that TikTok is not on their officials’ smartphones within 30 days, consistent with a law President Joe Biden signed into law in early January.
Olivia DaltonWhite House deputy press secretary, said the government “will continue to consider other possible actions (…) including how to work with Congress on this issue in the future.”
Many US congressmen view the short-form viral video platform as a threat to national security.
Their fear, shared by a growing number of Western governments, is that Beijing could access user data around the world through the app, a practice that TikTok has always denied
A House committee will vote Tuesday on a Republican-backed bill that would give Biden the authority to ban outright TikTok in the U.S.
Then it would have to be approved by both houses, however the measures against China are one of the few issues that unite the right and the left in Congress.
The ACLU civil rights association opposes this law, considering that “I would censor a platform” and “would deprive Americans of their constitutional right to free speech”, according to one of his lawyers, Jenna Leventoffcited in a statement.
for months, TikTok has been awaiting the results of a review by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), a government agency that assesses the risk of any foreign investment to the country’s national security.
“The fastest and most effective way to address these concerns (…) is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed settlement that we have worked with them on for almost two years.”, added the spokesperson, specifying that TikTok it had already begun to implement various points of the agreement to “secure” the platform in the United States.
The European Commission and the Government of Canada recently made similar decisions for the mobile phones of their officials.
Source: AFP
Source: Gestion
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