Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has introduced a bill that would prohibit Americans from downloading social media app TikTok on their devices and ban U.S. companies from transacting with its parent company ByteDance.
“TikTok poses a threat to all Americans who have the app on their devices. It opens the door for the Chinese Communist Party to access Americans’ personal information, keystrokes, and location through aggressive data harvesting,” Hawley said in a statement published Wednesday.
The No TikTok on United States Devices Act comes less than a month after a bill banning the video-sharing platform from federal government devices was signed into law as a provision in a $1.7 trillion government spending bill.
“Banning it on government devices was a step in the right direction, but now is the time to ban it nationwide to protect the American people,” Hawley said.
The new bill would direct the president to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to prohibit commercial transactions with Chinese company ByteDance and require the director of national intelligence to submit a report to Congress on national security threats posed by TikTok.
The legislation has a companion bill in the House introduced by Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo.
