Two Republican legislators presented a bill to Congress on Wednesday (26) that seeks to ban the TikTok application on devices in the country.
Congressmen Josh Hawlye of the Senate and Ken Buck of the House of Representatives, who are leading the proposal, accuse the Chinese app of being a “threat to US national security”.
“TikTok is not only directly associated with the Chinese Communist Party, but has also been used to spy on Americans,” Buck wrote on his Twitter account.
The bill directs the Executive to block and prohibit transactions by US entities or individuals with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
In addition, it asks the director of National Intelligence to deliver a report to Congress on TikTok activities that lawmakers consider a “national threat”, including the alleged permission to the Chinese government to access American data, according to the news portal “The Hill”.
TikTok has denied these allegations in the past, ensuring that it does not censor content or provide the Chinese government with access to its data.
In December of last year, the US Congress passed a law banning the use of the popular video app on official federal government devices.
Several states, such as Texas, Alabama, Virginia and Tennessee, have already done the same at the state level, while territories such as Indiana have filed lawsuits against ByteDance for allegedly allowing Chinese spying.
In 2019, and as part of his strategy to increase pressure on China, then US President Donald Trump gave an ultimatum to TikTok to transfer its operations to American companies if it did not want to be banned from the country, something that in the however, it ended up not happening.
TikTok has more than 100 million users in the United States and in a short time it has become one of the most popular social networks in the world, especially among teenagers.
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