Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo testified that she supports Congress passing legislation to give her agency tools to counter foreign-owned apps that pose national security threats.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told senators on Wednesday that she supports Congress giving her agency new tools to counter apps owned by foreign companies in adversarial countries. Raimondo said in testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee that she supports a bipartisan bill known as the RESTRICT Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and John Thune, R-S.D., as well as legislation that Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., is drafting called the Guard Act.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has previously denied that TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, is able to access data from the app’s more than 150 million users in the U.S. and share it with the Chinese government upon request. The company has also pointed to more than $1.5 billion the company has spent on data security to assuage policymakers’ concerns about the platform’s potential use by China for spying.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. began a security review of TikTok during the Trump administration that has continued in the Biden administration. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that CFIUS informed TikTok that ByteDance’s China-based owners would have to divest their stakes in the social media platform it may be banned.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle remain wary about the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to access American TikTok users’ data via ByteDance and the potential use of the platform as an outlet for CCP propaganda. Thune and Warner’s RESTRICT Act would give the president, through the secretary of commerce, new authority to mitigate the threats posed by technology products from adversarial nations.
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