Republican Senator Marco Rubio on Tuesday unveiled bipartisan legislation to ban China’s popular social media app TikTok, mounting pressure on owner ByteDance Ltd amid U.S. fears the app could be used to surveil Americans and censor content.
The legislation would ban all transactions from any social media company in or under the control of Russia and China, Rubio’s office said in a news release, adding that a companion bill in the U.S. House of Representatives was introduced by Republican congressman Mike Gallagher and Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi.
“It is troubling that rather than encouraging the administration to conclude its national security review of TikTok, some members of Congress have decided to push for a politically-motivated ban that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement.
He added that the company would continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that are “well underway” to “further secure our platform in the United States.”
The bill comes as scrutiny of TikTok has increased in Washington in recent weeks, after a failed attempt by the Trump administration to bar the video-sharing app.
At a hearing in November, FBI Director Chris Wray said TikTok’s U.S. operations posed national security concerns, pointing out the risk that the Chinese government could use it to influence users or control their devices.
Utah and Alabama on Monday joined other U.S. states in banning the use of TikTok on state government devices and computer networks owing to national security concerns.
Buy Crypto NowIn 2020, then-President Donald Trump tried to prevent new users from downloading TikTok and block other transactions that would have effectively prohibited the app’s use in the United States but lost a series of court battles over the measure.
The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a powerful national security body, in 2020 instructed ByteDance to divest TikTok due to fears that U.S. user data could be handed down to China’s communist government.
TikTok and CFIUS have been in talks for months trying to come to a national security agreement to protect the data of TikTok’s more than 100 million users.
