A bipartisan pair of senators want the intelligence community to examine the national security risks posed by TikTok, a popular short-form video app owned by a Chinese company.
Sen. Tom Cotton who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire raising concerns about TikTok and requesting U.S. intelligence officials conduct an assessment of the app and other similar platforms based in China and used in the United States.
The two then want Congress briefed on the intelligence community’s findings.
“With over 110 million downloads in the U.S. alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore,” Cotton and Schumer told Maguire.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based tech company, and the social media app’s policies detail its collection of a variety of data from users and their devices, including IP addresses and communications.
The two senators warned Maguire about TikTok’s data-collection policies, as well as the possibility it could be compelled to support intelligence work by the Chinese Communist Party and be a “potential target of foreign influence campaigns like those carried out during the 2016 election on U.S.-based social media platforms.”
Schumer and Cotton also questioned whether videos on TikTok, which has exploded in popularity among teens, could be censored if they are deemed politically sensitive to the Chinese government, especially if they include material related to the protest movement in Hong Kong and China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims, more than 1 million of whom have been detained in internment and “reeducation camps.”
The Trump administration has taken steps to limit possible security risks posed by Chinese companies, including by blacklisting telecom company Huawei in May. But Schumer and Cotton said, “further action is needed, particularly as China continues to shut out U.S.-based technology firms while promoting and expanding the global reach of its own companies.”
Schumer and Cotton aren’t the only two lawmakers urging the Trump administration to take a closer look at TikTok. Sen. Marco Rubio requested this month the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. review the national security implications of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly and purported censorship of content.
The video-sharing platform is the latest to find itself intertwined in tensions between the U.S. and China, which have heightened due to the ongoing trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
A number of U.S. entities and corporations, including the NBA, Apple, and Blizzard Entertainment have been weathering criticisms from Congress over what lawmakers say is their cowering to Beijing in order to protect their access to the Chinese market.
[Also read: China takes aim at Apple over map app that helps Hong Kong protesters]
