TikTok faces more heat in Washington, as House members introduce legislation demanding ByteDance divestiture
Summary
Lawmakers introduced a bill in Congress on Tuesday that would require Chinas ByteDance to divest TikTok in order to avoid a ban of the video app in the U.S. Representatives Mike Gallagher, R-Wi., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., introduced the legislation, dubbed "Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act." President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2022 intended to prevent TikTok from being accessed and used on government-owned devices, and other states have enacted similar government-related TikTok-app bans. Before that, Donald Trump, Bidens predecessor in the White House, claimed that TikTok represented a national security threat because it collects American users data, which could then be accessed by the Chinese government. In mid-2020, the committee on foreign investment in the United States (CFIUS) released a ruling that ByteDance needed to divest its U.S. assets within 90 days.