E-Paper
US should consider banning TikTok, says senator
TikTok has been banned in India since 2020, in the aftermath of the violence in Ladakh in which 20 Indian soldiers died for their country.
United States senator Chuck Schumer believes a proposal to ban popular short-form video hosting service TikTok in the country 'should be looked at'.
Schumer told ABC news Sunday, "We do know there is Chinese ownership of the company that owns TikTok. And there are some people in the Commerce Committee that are looking into that right now. We'll see where they come out."
Meanwhile, Republican senator from Florida Marco Rubio and Angus King, an independent lawmaker from Maine, have reintroduced a new legislation aimed at target TikTok - unless it cuts ties from its current owner, a report by US broadcaster CNN said.
TikTok - which hosts user-submitted videos ranging from three seconds to 10 minutes long - is owned by a Chinese firm, ByteDance. The service has been banned in India since 2020, in the aftermath of the violence in Ladakh in which 20 Indian soldiers died for their country.
US lawmakers and officials have often raised concern over Chinese laws they say force TikTok to provide data about US-based users that may be misused by Chinese intelligence or for disinformation purposes. Such concerns prompted the US administration to ban the app from devices used by government officials.
Earlier this month, Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator from Colorado, urged tech giants Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores over concerns about national security. In a letter to the tech companies, Bennet called TikTok 'an unacceptable threat to the national security of the United States'.
TikTok has in the past denied claims of leaking information to the Chinese government. It has said a US-based team decides who can access the nation's user data from China.
Meanwhile, the company's Singapore CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is scheduled to testify on issues pertaining to TikTok's relationship to the Chinese Communist Party, its privacy and data security, impact on users, before the US Congress in March, the CNN report said.
"We hope that by sharing details of our comprehensive plans with the full Committee, Congress can take a more deliberative approach to the issues at hand," a TikTok spokesperson said .
