The United States Congress, on Tuesday, passed a bill to ban the use of the popular social media platform, Tiktok, within the country.
The PUNCH reported that one of the bill’s sponsors, Republican Senator, Marco Rubio, of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement, stated that the app was not just about creating videos, but also a major tool with which the Chinese Government obtains sensitive data from its citizens.
He said, “This is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day.
“We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”
The proposed legislation, in general, is aimed at protecting Americans from the threat posed by certain foreign adversaries using current or potential future social media companies that those foreign adversaries control to surveil Americans, learn sensitive data about Americans, or spread influence campaigns, propaganda, and censorship.
The new bill follows the precedence laid down by other Republican-led states, such as: Texas, South Dakota, and Maryland, which have all moved to restrict the use of Tiktok on government-owned devices.
The bill includes not only TikTok, but its parent company, Bytedance, also, as well as other subsidiaries of the company, as social media platforms of particular concern.
Similarly, the US military, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security have all restricted the app from operating on their computer devices.
