Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio on Tuesday called for the banning of Chinese video sharing platform TikTok after China acquired a stake and board seat in a subsidiary of the platform’s parent company.
“The Biden Administration can no longer pretend that TikTok is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party,” Rubio said. “President Biden must take immediate action to remove ByteDance and TikTok from the equation.”
The Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok in August 2020, claiming China was using the app to illegally harvest user data, but the ban was never enforced due to several court orders. Biden repealed the ban in June 2021, instead directing the Commerce Department to evaluate the platform and determine whether it posed a national security or economic risk.
The app has attracted controversy over the past few years due to repeated privacy violations, paying a $5.7 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in February 2019 for illegally collecting data on children. The platform also settled a $92 million class-action lawsuit in February 2021 over allegations it harvested and shared personal information without users’ consent.
“Even before today, it was clear that TikTok represented a serious threat to personal privacy and U.S. national security,” Rubio said. “Beijing’s aggressiveness makes clear that the regime sees TikTok as an extension of the party-state, and the U.S. needs to treat it that way.”
“We must also establish a framework of standards that must be met before a high-risk, foreign-based app is allowed to operate on American telecommunications networks and devices,” he said.
