The Chinese technology company known to be the controller of social media titan TikTok has recently received a massive ultimatum coming from the Biden administration to either sell the vertical video application or face a possible ban in the United States.
Both Republican and Democratic legislators have been outspoken in their worries about quite a few reports which seem to indicate that the officials of the Chinese Communist Party can currently access the TikTok user data, a platform on which American young people spend more time than any other place on the web. The implications regarding national security have forced Biden’s hand to call for a total divestiture of the platform from ByteDance or be subjected to a nationwide ban.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is a board created out of a group of nine cabinet-level officials that have the responsibility of looking at the implications regarding national security of various international investments, called on the company ByteDance to sell off the platform, as explained in a recent report from The Wall Street Journal. The company issued a promise to spend a budget of $1.5 in order to safeguard the user data of Americans and to make sure that officials from communist China have no power to access the information.
“If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn’t solve the problem: a change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access,” expressed Brooker Oberwetter, a spokeswoman for TikTok, in a statement issued to The Wall Street Journal. “The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent, U.S.-based protection of U.S. user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification, which we are already implementing.”
TikTok actually has put up an offer for a national security proposal labeled Project Texas to the American legislators. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States quickly rejected this proposal, as explained in a report from last week issued by Bloomberg.
Officials from the Trump Administration had previously attempted to force this type of divestiture on TikTok about three years ago because of national security concerns in the same vein. Reignited controversy for the social media platform has sparked as the relations between America and China have continued to degrade in the wake of at least one Chinese surveillance balloon recently traversing the continental United States.
President Joe Biden, along with a number of officials from the state level, have already instituted bans against TikTok being on government devices. In a shockingly similar turn of events, the European Union has also made the same move.
