On Wednesday the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to pass legislation that would ban the use of the video-sharing app TikTok on government phones and devices. This comes in response to growing concerns the app poses a cybersecurity risk and is a threat to national security.
The “No TikTok on Government Devices Act,” was first introduced by Republican Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. The bill will essentially follow up on steps already taken by the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and The Transportation Security Administration to ban the video application from being used on federal government devices.
Despite the bill passing through the Senate unanimously, it still needs to be passed by the House and then signed into law by President Biden.
“TikTok is a Trojan Horse for the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a major security risk to the United States, and until it is forced to sever ties with China completely, it has no place on government devices,” Hawley said in a statement. “States across the U.S. are banning TikTok on government devices. It’s time for Joe Biden and the Democrats to help do the same.”
Tonight the Senate unanimously passed my bill to BAN TikTok on all government devices
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) December 15, 2022
ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, has been linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Despite security concerns about the app's security, it still has massive popularity in the United States, particularly among teenagers. A study by the Pew Research Center showing that nearly 70 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds in the U.S. use the app regularly.
Earlier this week Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced a bill that would eliminate TikTok from the United States completely.
“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok. This isn’t about creative videos — 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,” Rubio said in a statement announcing the bill.
“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 Trump administration was much more aggressive than the Biden administration when it comes to challenging TikTok. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) did what few Democrats are willing to do and admit Trump was right when it comes to the video sharing social media app.
“As painful as it is for me to say, if Donald Trump was right and we could’ve taken action then, that’d have been a heck of a lot easier than trying to take action in November of 2022,” Warner said in an interview with Recode. “The sooner we bite the bullet, the better.”
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