In September 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order that effectively banned the use of the Chinese-owned app TikTok. Trump had tried to get an American company, Microsoft, to purchase its assets.
Many on the left complained that TikTok wasn’t doing anything that other social media companies weren’t doing. Other platforms capture users’ data for marketing purposes as well. But China is a potential enemy — even in 2020, it was clear that the competition between China and America was going to be taken to the next level. And Trump’s executive order made that clear.
“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” the executive order read.
The EO was challenged in federal court and was never enforced. But Trump was onto the Chinese even if Democrats weren’t.
The Biden administration ended the executive order banning TikTok in June 2021 saying a broader national security approach was needed to deal with the threat from China. That “broader approach” has not been in evidence, so Congress is taking matters into its own hands.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced legislation in both the House and the Senate to ban TikTok “by blocking and prohibiting all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern,” the lawmakers said in a news release.
Under the measure, the president could impose sanctions on TikTok and other social media companies to prevent commercial operation in the U.S.
With Congress in session for only a few more days this year, the bill is unlikely to be considered in either chamber. But it could be reintroduced next year, when its prospects in the House would be higher under a Republican majority.
In June, BuzzFeed News reported that China-based employees of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, had accessed nonpublic data about U.S. users. TikTok denied turning over any U.S. data to Chinese officials and said it never would, though it acknowledged that Chinese employees have some access to it.
In November, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Congress that TikTok was a national security threat and he was “very concerned.” He said China could use it to “control data collection of millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which can be used for influence operations.”
Two years after Donald Trump tried to get an American company to take over TikTok’s American assets because he saw the app as a threat to America’s social media users and more than a year after Joe Biden revoked Trump’s executive order banning TikTok, Congress is finally ready to take concrete action to protect American citizens and American interests from this blatant effort by the Chinese to spy on us.
Trump won’t hold his breath for an apology. But he was right, and his opponents were dead wrong.
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