Josh Hawley would present a bill in the United States to restrict the use of the app TikTok
U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican and a China hawk, has promised to introduce legislation in the United States to limit access to the TikTok app. Before, the US government said that all federal employees had to make sure that Chinese people couldn’t use the app or install it on any government-owned device.
“TikTok is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives.” “It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health,” he said on Twitter. “Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide.”
But Hawley hasn’t updated us on when the bill will be introduced in the House. In the meantime, ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, has issued a statement saying that the strategy Hawley is taking is incorrect.
“Senator Hawley’s call for a total ban of TikTok takes a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy, and online harms,” said spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter. “We hope that he will focus his energies on efforts to address those issues holistically rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve any of the problems he’s concerned about or make Americans any safer.”
The Chinese app TikTok has received a lot of negative feedback recently. Many countries have begun to restrict the app’s use in response to numerous claims of data theft and misappropriation leveled against the corporation. For security reasons, the United States has recently outlawed even installing the software on any government-owned smartphones.
The app has been the subject of several lawsuits alleging that it violates users’ privacy and has a negative impact on young people’s mental health. The Seattle Public School District filed one such suit, accusing TikTok of negatively impacting students’ emotional well-being. The school said that social media sites like TikTok may be to blame for the rise in depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and bullying among young people.