SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) introduced a bill that would ban the social media app TikTok in the United States on Wednesday.
This is not the first time that lawmakers have looked at banning the ever-growing social media platform as they continue to fear possible interference from China through the app.
“[TikTok] is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives. It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health,” Hawley said in a tweet on Tuesday. “Last month Congress banned it on all government devices. Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide.”
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Hawley shared in a statement on his website on Tuesday that he would announce the legislation on Wednesday.
“What my bill does is it specifically goes after TikTok — it bans it. It doesn’t ban any other app,” Hawley said to reporters. “But listen, I welcome all efforts to ban TikTok, of whatever form it takes.”
State legislatures have been passing bills to ban the app on some government devices. A separate measure, penned by Hawley, wrapped into the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill did exactly the same.
TikTok wasn’t the only thing banned in the provision signed into law last month by President Biden, all other applications from ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, were also included in the measure. Now all qualifying apps are banned on executive branch devices.
The proposed legislation would have the president use the International Emergency Economic Power Act to block and prohibit transactions with ByteDance. The proposal would also carry penalties for those that attempt to work around the sanctions.
Furthermore, the bill would require the Director of National Intelligence to submit a report and brief Congress on what lawmakers have called threats to national security posed by the social media platform.
The report would also examine the claims that the Chinese government has access to US user data through the app and that it is being used for “intelligence or military purposes, including surveillance, microtargeting, deep fakes, or blackmail.”
TikTok has denied the allegations from Hawley and other members of Congress. Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for the company, shared in a statement that the ban “takes a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy, and online harms,” The Hill reported.
Oberwetter continued in the statement by saying the company hopes Hawley will “focus his energies on efforts to address those issues holistically, rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve any of the problems he’s concerned about or make Americans any safer.”
Currently it is not known if Halwey would have enough votes to pass the measure in the split Congress, meaning, for now, you can keep scrolling.
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