‘If they pass it, I’ll sign it,’ said President Joe Biden of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
President Joe Biden is expressing support for a bipartisan bill that could ban TikTok from the United States on national security grounds.
President Biden spoke to reporters outside Air Force One, saying he would sign the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act should Congress pass the bill.
“If they pass it, I’ll sign it,” he said.
Should it become law, it would grant the president the authority to force the divestiture of social media companies operating in the United States that are more than 20 percent controlled by one of four covered nations or their related entities.
Those nations are China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
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Foremost among those companies, and named explicitly in the bill, is the social media giant TikTok, which is owned by the China-based ByteDance.
Security experts have long warned that TikTok is a weaponized application that could be used to promote Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda or feed Americans’ data directly to the regime.
Notably, TikTok officials previously admitted to suppressing and heating content at the regime’s request, but claim that is no longer the company’s practice. Relatedly, the U.S. government is investigating ByteDance for allegedly using TikTok geolocation data to stalk and harass American journalists who reported on the company’s links to the CCP.
Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said the effort was essential to ending the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to “target, surveil, and manipulate Americans.”
“We have given TikTok a clear choice: Divest from your parent company, which is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, and remain in operation in the United States, or side with the Chinese Communist Party and face a ban,” she said.
“Companies controlled by a foreign adversary like the CCP will never embrace American values, virtues of our society and culture like freedom of speech, human rights, the rule of law, a free press, and others.”
That decision has led some in Congress to question the president’s sincerity regarding a willingness to pass the bill.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) suggested that the Biden administration wasn’t really serious about passing the TikTok bill when it made its way through Congress.
“The Biden administration says one thing and does another,” Mr. Norman told The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet NTD. “You don’t open up an account of anything that you say you want to abolish.
“We’ve got to get completely separated from China as best we can. And the process starts by not letting them infiltrate the minds of young people and adults.”
Luis Martinez contributed to this report.
Original News Source Link – Epoch Times
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