TikTok is staring down yet another potential national ban, as Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD) are set to introduce a bipartisan bill seeking to shut the app out of the U.S.
The legislation, called the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information Communications Technology Act, or RESTRICT Act, is just the latest effort by Congress to sideline the short-form video app.
Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced the Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries, or DATA, Act, which would give President Biden the ability to ban the app. Though there’s no word on whether the legislation will move to a full House vote.
Shares of Meta (META) and Snap (SNAP) were up on the news.
TikTok is under ever-increasing scrutiny in Washington, with intelligence agencies saying the app could be used by China to spy on Americans or spread pro-Chinese propaganda. TikTok is owned by China-based parent company ByteDance. Under Chinese law, organizations are required to turn over data to Chinese authorities at their request.
The U.S. government has tried to kill TikTok, which has some 100 million U.S. users, before. Former President Trump attempted to force the app to shut down via executive order, though that was blocked in the courts.
The U.S. government, states, and foreign governments including the E.U. have already banned TikTok from official devices.
While government agencies and politicians have raised concerns about China’s ability to influence TikTok, there’s been little evidence that it’s actually doing so.
In 2022, TikTok migrated all U.S. user data to Oracle servers from its own located in Virginia and Singapore. At the time, the company also had backups on servers based in Singapore but is deleting those, as well.
TikTok has denied that it is a threat to U.S. national security, while groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have said an outright ban of the app would violate the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.
Cybersecurity experts say that TikTok collects the same amount and kind of data as other social media platforms. An investigation by Toronto University’s Citizen Lab found that “TikTok’s program features and code do not pose a threat to national security.”
A study by the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Governance Project, meanwhile, found that “TikTok is a commercially motivated enterprise and not a tool of the Chinese state.” The study also found that “TikTok is not exporting censorship, either directly by blocking material, or indirectly via its recommendation algorithm.”
Experts say that the Chinese government could use other means to collect Americans’ user data, such as by scraping publicly available data from sites like Facebook and Instagram. China’s government already uses American social networks to spread its own propaganda.
Whether a ban on TikTok will hold up is an open question. The company is likely to challenge any law that attempts to keep it from operating out of the U.S. And based on its past success, the company could once again come out on top.
Editor's note: Tiktok is working with Oracle to move user data to that company's servers and off of its own in Virginia and Singapore.
Got a tip? Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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