US Senate to Consider New Bipartisan Bill to Empower Biden to Act Against TikTok, Media Reports

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Democrats aligned to Joe Biden are to table in the US Senate a bipartisan bill to give the president the authority to act against Chinese social media app TikTok, resuming an initiative pursued by his predecessor Donald Trump, US media reported Monday.

The highly-anticipated bill, that is expected to be unveiled Tuesday afternoon by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, will allow Biden to respond to threats posed by TikTok and companies like it, a committee spokeswoman was reported as telling US media.

Warner, a Democrat from the state of Virginia, will appear with John Thune, a senator from the rival Republican party, at a news conference to announce the bill, the spokeswoman said.

Us media said the precise text of the legislation had not been released, but Warner’s comments over the past weekend suggested the bill will not be limited simply to reining in TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance.

US lawmakers need a systemic approach toward foreign technology to "ban or prohibit it when necessary", Warner told US media on Sunday, adding that "TikTok is one of the potentials" that could be targeted by the bill.

Falling back on Trump’s oft-repeated message, the senator accused TikTok of "taking data from Americans [and] not keeping it safe". He also said what worried him more about the Chinese social media platform was that it could be a "propaganda tool" in which "the kind of videos you see would promote ideological issues".

US executives at TikTok — a video sharing platform that allows users worldwide to film themselves dancing in their living room, lip-synching jokes, capturing animal antics and sharing other slivers of personal life — have vehemently denied charges in the past of abusing the personal data of Americans.

Us media reported that Warner’s bill would come nearly a week after the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a Republican-sponsored bill with similar aims. That House legislation passed the GOP-controlled committee 24-16 along party lines, with unanimous GOP support and no Democratic votes.

The, so-called Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries, or DATA Act mandates that the president impose broad sanctions on companies based in or controlled by China that engage in the transfer of "sensitive personal data" of Americans to entities or individuals based in, or controlled by, China.

The latest action against TikTok comes nearly two years after Biden canceled in June 2021 Trump’s ban on Chinese social media apps TikTok and WeChat and signed his own executive order to protect US information technology and communications supply chains from threats that include those from China.

The ban on TikTok and WeChat were part of a long-running diplomatic and trade war waged with China by Trump during the better part of his four years in office prior to Biden’s term, which began in January 2021.