White House ‘very in favor’ of bill thought to target TikTok

theguardian.com:

One of the authors of a Senate bill that would enable the federal commerce department to ban technologies with links to foreign governments has said that the Joe Biden White House is “very in favor” of the measure, but he stopped short of saying whether the president’s administration has discussed possibly prohibiting the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok in particular.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that the proposed legislation has also picked up support in his congressional chamber from 11 Democrats – of which he is one – as well as 11 Republicans.

“I think the White House is very in favor of this bill,” said Warner, chairperson of the Senate’s select committee on intelligence. Without saying whether Biden’s administration would push for these steps to be taken against TikTok, Warner added: “We [would] give the secretary of commerce the tools to ban, to force a sale.”

TikTok has drawn close congressional scrutiny because the data of users on the popular video sharing platform could be available to the government of China, the US’s rival global superpower. The Chinese firm ByteDance owns TikTok, and Warner said laws in China require the owner company to make user data accessible to the country’s ruling Communist party.

Some lawmakers have advocated for a blanket ban of TikTok, which is headquartered in San Jose. But one of the other responses from Capitol Hill has been for Warner and the Republican South Dakota senator John Thune to draft and rally support for what is known as the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Act.

Also known as the Restrict Act, the measure would authorize the Oval Office – through