[Global News] Reuters and other media reports, U.S. President Joe Biden on the night of 11 local time in the TikTok platform debut, triggering some U.S. politicians “worry”, the White House on the 12th responded by claiming that the Biden administration’s policy on TikTok will not change.
According to Reuters, Democratic Senator Mark Warner claimed on 12 December that he was concerned about the impact of the Biden campaign’s decision to join TikTok on US national security. “I think we still need to find a way to follow India’s initiative, which has banned TikTok,” he claimed, adding that a number of Republican lawmakers have also criticised the Biden campaign’s decision to join TikTok on national security grounds, the report added.
Against this backdrop, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on 12 December that the ban on the use of TikTok on U.S. government equipment “remains in effect today,” according to CNN. He also told reporters to ask the Biden campaign questions about the video.
Also at the same press conference, White House press secretary Jean Pierre said she had no knowledge of the Biden campaign’s intention to be on TikTok. She added, “As White House press secretary, I don’t communicate with the campaign on any strategy or anything like that.”
According to US media reports, the Biden campaign has entered TikTok, and the TikTok account “bidenhq” operated by the team released its first video on 11th local time, which is believed to be aimed at winning the votes of young voters. At the end of the video, Biden was asked whether he would vote for himself or Trump, to which he laughed and said, “Are you kidding me?” before choosing himself.
For a period of time, the U.S. government and some members of Congress frequently take “national security” to say things, unreasonable suppression of TikTok. 31 January local time, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary in Washington, D.C., held a hearing titled “large technology companies and the crisis of child sexual exploitation on the Internet”. “hearing, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the five social media giants to participate in the meeting to testify, and accept the U.S. lawmakers “torture”. The theme of the hearing was supposed to be “online child sexual exploitation”, but the questions asked by the legislators were way off the mark. Tom Cotton, a well-known anti-Chinese congressman, faced TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzhi, who testified, repeatedly questioned Zhou Shouzhi’s nationality and other issues, to which the TikTok CEO answered the question about nationality eight times, saying that he was a Singaporean. For this outrageous behaviour of Tom Cotton, many netizens condemned him as “xenophobic” and “nakedly racist”.
Earlier, it was also reported in the media that the Biden administration asked ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a US ban. In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that China has always maintained that the issue of data security should not become a tool for individual countries to generalise the concept of national security and abuse national power to unreasonably suppress enterprises in other countries. The U.S. side has so far failed to produce evidence to prove that TikTok threatens U.S. national security. The United States should stop spreading false information on data security issues, stop unreasonably suppressing the enterprises concerned, and provide an open, fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for enterprises from all countries to invest and operate in the United States.
