By Christian George
A United States Senator, Josh Hawley, today, vowed to ban the short video app, Tiktok, in the State.
This was followed by a ban to stop federal employees from using or downloading TikTok on government-owned devices.
The short video app owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, is seen as China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives and it threatens children’s privacy as well as their mental health. “Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide”, Senator Hawley tweeted.
Though when the bill to be introduced is not stated but the senator stressed that the usage of Tiktok is disastrous to children’s mental health.
However, Tiktok has refuted Senator Hawley’s claims, saying that he is taking the wrong approach.
The company’s spokeswoman, Brooke Oberwetter, said that Senator Hawley’s call for a total ban of TikTok takes a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy and online harms, urging him to “focus his energies on efforts to address those issues holistically, rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve any of the problems he’s concerned about or make Americans any safer.”