Updated on 03/24/2023 at 8:51 a.m.: Shou Chew, the boss of TikTok, tried yesterday Thursday to defend his application against American elected officials. The hearing lasted more than five hours.
“ByteDance is indebted to the Chinese Communist Party and ByteDance and TikTok are the same,” Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, told her.
Shou Chew acknowledged that the platform still has old US user data stored on servers accessed by Chinese employees. He also promised that by the end of the year, all information related to the 150 million American users of the social network would be managed only from Oracle servers located in the United States. But “today there is still data that we need to delete,” he added.
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The United States Congress is joining Joe Biden in an attempt to counter the influence of TikTok, owned by a Chinese company, on American social media users.
The President of the United States began his efforts on this issue late last year with the approval in December of a bill that made it illegal to download TikTok on a government-issued device.
For what ? TikTok, federal authorities believe, can be a major national security concern. They also fear that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is manipulating the app’s algorithm to amplify political propaganda. In recent weeks, eight Western governments abruptly banned the use of the app on government-issued devices, showing that concern over the app is not unique to US officials.
Towards an ease of prohibitions
And this month, the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved a bill that could allow President Biden to ban the app, without the legal hurdles the former president faced. Donald Trump had to face it when he tried to ban TikTok in 2020.
Indeed, Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries Act, or DATA Act, eliminates the legal problems the President of the United States would face if he decided to implement a nationwide ban on the app altogether. In late 2020, when President Trump tried to ban the app, several federal judges denied his request.
If the DATA Act becomes law via a vote of the House of Representatives, it will allow the current president and future presidents to impose sanctions on any foreign company that operates a “connected software application that (…) operates directly or indirectly on behalf of China”.
The CEO of TikTok will try to defend himself
For the moment, the only popular application in the United States that is likely to be the subject of this law is indeed TikTok. But going forward, any technology that the United States government believes is spying on American citizens on behalf of the Chinese government will be banned altogether.
Similarly, 12 U.S. senators have proposed the RESTRICT Act, which would allow the U.S. Department of Commerce to severely restrict security-risk technologies from all adversaries of the United States, namely China, Russia, Russia, and China. North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.
The bill also mentions that any application created by a foreign country that interferes with elections in the United States or in countries aligned with the United States is subject to a ban in the United States. US officials have expressed concern about Chinese, Russian and North Korean interference in Taiwanese, Ukrainian and South Korean elections, in addition to targeting US voters.
In France, on March 2, 2023, Olivier Veran, spokesperson for the government, stated: “Whether it is the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister or members of the government, we have professional telephones which, in any case, do not do not tolerate the installation of any social network type application. »
Source: ZDNet.com
