Pressure was mounting in the United States against TikTok on Tuesday with the advancement in Congress of a bill that could lead to the banning of the very popular application in the United States, the day after it was banned on the smartphones of civil servants by the White House.
TikTok considers this ban to be “political theater”, and regrets that “this approach is copied by other governments around the world”, according to a spokesperson for the platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Monday evening, the White House ordered federal institutions to ensure that TikTok disappears from their smartphones within 30 days, pursuant to a law ratified in early January by President Joe Biden.
And the government will “continue to examine other possible measures”, Olivia Dalton, a spokeswoman for the executive, said on Tuesday, “including how to work with Congress on this subject in the future”.
Many U.S. elected officials view the short-form, viral video platform as a national security threat.
They fear, along with a growing number of Western governments, that Beijing could access user data around the world through this app, something TikTok has denied for years.
A House committee is due to vote Tuesday on a Republican-backed bill that would give Joe Biden the authority to completely ban TikTok in the United States.
It would then have to be adopted by both chambers, but the measures against China are one of the few subjects that unite both right and left in Congress.
The powerful civil rights association ACLU is opposed to this law which would “censor a platform” and “deprive Americans of their constitutional right to freedom of expression”, declared one of its lawyers, Jenna Leventoff, quoted in a communicated.
TikTok has been waiting for months for the findings of a review by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), a government agency that assesses the risks of any foreign investment to US national security.
“The quickest and most effective way to address these concerns […] is that CFIUS adopts the proposed agreement that we have been working on with them for almost two years, “added the spokesperson, specifying that TikTok had already started to put in place different points of this agreement to “secure” the platform. in the USA.
The European Commission and the Government of Canada recently made similar decisions for their civil servants’ mobile phones.