WASHINGTON: Republican Senator Marco Rubio urged President Joe Biden yesterday to block short-form video app TikTok in the US after China took an ownership stake in a key subsidiary of ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok.
The Biden administration in June withdrew a series of Trump-era executive orders that sought to ban new downloads of WeChat and TikTok.
“Beijing’s aggressiveness makes clear that the regime sees TikTok as an extension of the party-state, and the US needs to treat it that way,” Rubio said.
“We must also establish a framework of standards that must be met before a high-risk, foreign-based app is allowed to operate on American telecommunications networks and devices.”
The Commerce Department is conducting a Biden-ordered review of security concerns posed by those apps and others.
“TikTok is led by an executive team in the US and Singapore,” TikTok said in a statement, adding that “the China-based subsidiary of ByteDance Ltd referenced has no ownership of TikTok.”
TikTok is not available in China.
Dismissing Rubio’s comments on TikTok as “political manipulation”, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a daily Press briefing that US politicians who are bent on saying anti-China comments with disregard of facts are “destined to be swept into the waste dumps of history”.
The Chinese government took a stake and a board seat in a ByteDance entity this year – a move that raises questions over how much influence Beijing is planning to wield in a tech sector reeling under an onslaught of regulatory action. The 1pc stake in Beijing ByteDance Technology, which holds some of the licences for Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, as well as news aggregator Toutiao, was registered on April 30, according to corporate information app Tianyancha.
It 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.
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