The Biden administration is reportedly demanding that TikTok's Chinese owners sell their stake in the short-form video sharing app or it could face a possible U.S. ban.
First reported by The Wall Street Journal, the demand is said to have come from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., a multiagency federal task force that oversees national-security risks in cross-border investments.
It is the latest move in a crackdown on the ByteDance-owned app, which has already been the target of government restrictions. In February, the Biden administration ordered federal agencies to remove TikTok from government devices, and dozens of state governments have since passed similar bans on the app.
TikTok has been in the cross-hairs of U.S. regulators for years, going back to the Trump administration's failed attempt to bar the app from U.S. app stores in September 2020. Concerns over the app have heightened in recent months after both Republicans and Democrats called for officials to impose stricter data collection restrictions or ban the app from the U.S. entirely.
In August 2022, ByteDance submitted a plan detailing how it plans to prevent the Chinese government from having access to data on U.S. users, and how it will offer the U.S. government oversight of the platform. However, discussions between TikTok and Washington on the issue have reportedly stalled.
In related developments, TikTok is set to be banned on phones used by British government ministers and civil servants, following a review by the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Center. Canada, Belgium, and the European Commission have already barred the app from government phones.
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Top Rated Comments
Zero.
I've always wondered why Western countries allow China to play by completely different rules.
It was high time for something like this.
Yes, many apps and digital platforms exploit these vulnerabilities in the human brain/sensory system. But TikTok has taken it to an extreme.
They’ve done brain scans of Internet/video game/media addicts/phone(etc.) addicts and their brains patterns (reactions to visual input) shift away from normal brain patterns and get close to or completely identical to drug, sex or gamble addicts.
At its core, TikTok is essentially your classic slot machine but with perpetual visual/auditory stimulation that continuously adapts to show more of the content that gets the most watch time from the user.
If you think it’s completely benign that every person below 25 is glued to the same app for 6-12 hours a day then obviously I have no argument here.
My gripe with the app isn’t that it’s made by China but that it’s creating a generation of smartphone addicts.
TikTok would have been long gone before these privacy concerns if anyone listened to the research done on smartphones and behavioral addiction.
Have you ever read about the mice that get their brains wired up to a machine with a button they can press that releases dopamine in their bodies indefinitely without them having to move or do a single thing to get the “reward”? They press the button over and over again, more and more until they forget their other needs and their health withers away.
TikTok is an instantaneous, no effort, no payment dopamine trigger for humans that’s continuously being adapted to get better at making the user press the trigger again.
It’s completely terrible and I pray that ByteDance don’t sell their shares and that TikTok gets banned in the West permanently.
Current administration wants to ban it and the same media outlets are saying "yeah good idea!"