Bipartisan senators are teaming up to investigate TikTok
VSCO girls might be subject to a national security threat.
At least that's what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) are suggesting with a new request for Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. The two Senate Intelligence Committee members sent a letter to Maguire on Wednesday evening to ask for an investigation into TikTok and the Chinese company that owns it, The Washington Post reports.
TikTok is an app full of short videos typically set to music, and it's particularly popular among Gen Zers. It's been downloaded over 110 million times in the U.S., but its parent company ByteDance is actually based in China and could be subject to Chinese censorship rules.
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Cotton and Schumer want to know if TikTok follows those Chinese laws in the U.S. to control what American users can watch, saying in their letter that doing so could "compel Chinese companies to support and cooperate with intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party." They also suggest in the letter that TikTok's Chinese backing could make it a "potential target of foreign influence campaigns like those carried out during the 2016 election on U.S.-based social media platforms."
The senators' request follows one from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) asking Maguire to examine TikTok as an alleged manifestation of the "Chinese government's nefarious efforts to censor information inside free societies." ByteDance argues that American user data is stored in the U.S., but it's still unclear how closely it follows China's laws.
