2024-03-12 22:03:36
China may be using the mobile app TikTok to interfere in this year’s US presidential election. This was stated by the Director of the US National Intelligence Service, Avril Haynes, during a hearing in the Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the US Congress), reported Reuters.
Asked by Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamurthy whether the Chinese Communist Party would use TikTok to influence the results of the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election, Haynes said, “We can’t rule out the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party will use it.” .
Reuters points out that Krishnamurthy is the highest-ranking member of the House of Representatives China Committee from the Democratic minority. He and the committee’s chairman, Republican Mike Gallagher, introduced a bipartisan bill last week to ban the social media platform TikTok, which is used by 170 million Americans, in the US.
The ban bill, which passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously on Thursday, gives China’s ByteDance six months to divest itself of its ownership of TikTok or be effectively banned. in USA. The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the bill tomorrow, requiring a simple 2/3 majority of congressmen to pass.
US President Joe Biden said last week that he would sign this law. However, Reuters points to the popularity of “TikTok” and the apparently difficult to achieve approval simultaneously by both houses of Congress – the Senate and the House of Representatives, in an election year.
US congressmen have long expressed concern that the app could end up with the personal data of US citizens in China’s hands. The platform’s owners, who have assured US authorities that they have not and will not share personal data of TikTok users with the Chinese government, believe the bill actually means banning the company.
At the hearing in the US House of Representatives, FBI Director Christopher Wray also spoke, who once again described “TikTok” as a “threat to national security.” “Americans should ask themselves whether to give the Chinese government the ability to control access to their personal data,” Ray said, adding that the protection of mobile devices would be irretrievably broken, BTA writes.