La pressure montait aux Etats-Unis contre TikTok mardi avec la progression au Congrès d’un projet de loi qui pourrait déboucher sur l’interdiction totale de la très populaire application aux Etats-Unis, au lendemain de son interdiction sur les smartphones des fonctionnaires par the White House.
“TikTok is a modern Chinese Communist Party Trojan horse being used to monitor Americans and exploit their personal information,” Michael McCaul, chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Tuesday.
A threat to national security
This commission was debating on Tuesday, February 28, a bill led by the Republicans, which would give President Joe Biden the authority to completely ban TikTok, a subsidiary of the Chinese group ByteDance, in the United States.
It would first have to be adopted by both chambers. But moves that show America’s toughness against China are among the rare issues that unite left and right in Congress, especially after the destruction of an alleged Chinese spy balloon.
Many US lawmakers view the short-form viral video platform as a threat to national security. They fear, along with a growing number of Western governments, that Beijing could access user data from around the world through this app, something TikTok has denied for years.
On Monday night, the White House ordered federal institutions to ensure that TikTok disappears from their smartphones within 30 days, in accordance with a law ratified in early January by Joe Biden.
TikTok considered this ban a matter of “political theater”, and regretted that “this approach is copied by other governments around the world”, according to a spokesperson for the platform.
Possible “other measures” examined
The European Commission and the Canadian government recently made similar decisions for the mobile phones of their officials, and the Danish parliament announced Tuesday that it has asked parliamentarians and staff to remove the app from their devices.
The US government “will continue to examine other possible steps,” Olivia Dalton, an executive spokeswoman, said Tuesday, “including how to work with Congress on this issue going forward.”
Banning the app would amount to “censoring” millions of Americans, protested TikTok, which claims to have more than 100 million users in the United States.
The powerful ACLU civil rights association also opposes a bill that would “deprive Americans of their constitutional right to free speech,” argued one of its lawyers, Jenna Leventoff, quoted in a press release.
She calls on Congress to pass laws to prevent all platforms, not just TikTok, from collecting “so much personal data” about citizens.
A risk of influence from the youngest
TikTok and the White House recalled that a review was underway by a government agency, CFIUS, responsible for assessing the risks of any foreign investment for US national security.
The company stores US user data on servers located in the country. It admitted that China-based employees had access to it, but under a strict and limited framework, and not the Chinese government.
But for some elected officials, the problem runs deeper. Michael McCaul spoke of the risk of the platform’s powerful content recommendation algorithms being used to “influence younger generations.”
A full ban – like in India since 2020 – would anger many content creators and users, “but we are so far away from the next election that people have forgotten and another app has taken over,” says Andrew Selepak, a professor specializing in media and technology at the University of Florida.
Source: BFM TV
