Senator Marco Rubio Urges Joe Biden To Block TikTok In US, Here's Why!
JAKARTA - Republican Senator Marco Rubio urged President Joe Biden on Tuesday, August 17 to block the short video app TikTok in the United States. The call comes after China took ownership of major subsidiary ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok.
The Biden administration last June withdrew a series of President Donald Trump-era executive orders seeking to ban new downloads of WeChat and TikTok.
"Beijing's aggressiveness makes it clear that the regime sees TikTok as an extension of the party-state, and the US needs to treat it as such", Rubio said in a statement.
"We must also establish a standard framework that must be met before high-risk foreign-based applications are allowed to operate on American telecommunications networks and devices", added Rubio.
The Commerce Department is conducting a Biden-ordered review of the security concerns posed by the app and others. They did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
"TikTok is led by executive teams in the US and Singapore", TikTok said in a statement to Reuters. They added that "the China-based subsidiary ByteDance Ltd. referred to does not own TikTok".
TikTok Is Not Available in China
Rejecting Rubio's comments on TikTok as "political manipulation", Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a daily news conference that US politicians determined to say anti-China comments by ignoring facts "are doomed to be swept into the garbage dump of history, the network and American telecommunications equipment".
Company records show that the Chinese government took a stake and board seat in the entity ByteDance this year. It is a move that raises questions about how much influence Beijing plans to exert in a technology sector reeling under the onslaught of regulatory action.
According to enterprise information app Tianyancha, a 1% stake in Beijing ByteDance Technology, which holds multiple licenses for Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, as well as news aggregator Toutiao, was registered on April 30.
The stake is held by WangTouZhongWen (Beijing) Technology, which is owned by three Chinese state entities, including a fund backed by the country's main internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).
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While there is precedent for the Chinese government to hold stakes in tech companies, the news comes amid a surge in antitrust investigations and new rules for the industry, reversing the authorities' earlier laissez-faire approach.
A ByteDance representative said Beijing ByteDance Technology "only deals with some of the Chinese market ByteDance video and information platforms, and holds some of the licenses they need to operate under local law".