The White House supports a bipartisan bill that could be used to ban TikTok

The White House backed the bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate that would allow the federal government to regulate and ban the use of foreign-produced technology, which could include placing restrictions and bans on the use of foreign applications that violate the privacy and use user data, like TikTok .

The bill introduced Tuesday , called the Information and Communications Technology Emergency Restriction of Security Threats Act or RESTRICT Act, would give the Secretary of Commerce broad power to regulate technology produced by six countries that have antagonistic relations with the United States: China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela, according to NBC News.

The White House endorsed the RESTRICT Act Tuesday, calling it “a systematic framework for addressing technological threats to the security of Americans,” according to a statement from National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

Sullivan stressed in his statement that the bill “would empower the United States government to prevent certain foreign governments from exploiting technology services that operate in the United States in a way that poses risks to the confidential data of Americans and our National security.”

The senators who introduced the bill cited fears that TikTok, a social video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance that is hugely popular in the US and around the world, would provide Beijing with a constant stream of information. about its users.

“Today, the threat everyone is talking about is TikTok, and how it could enable surveillance by the Chinese Communist Party, or facilitate the spread of evil influence campaigns in the US. Yet before TikTok, it was Huawei. and ZTE, which threatened our nation's telecommunications networks. And before that, it was Russia's Kaspersky Lab, which threatened the security of government and corporate devices,” said Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark R. Warner.