Calls to ban TikTok didn't really get bipartisan until kind of the middle to end of last year. There was some reporting by a number of journalists that they were looking at the IP location data of users. In December, the company finally admitted that an audit team at ByteDance actually accessed the IP data of journalists who were doing some of this reporting on them in order to find their sources.
There’s at least one thing Democrats and Republicans in Washington have in common: suspicions about TikTok’s ties to China. The Biden administration and members of congress from both parties are urging the social media platform’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd., to sell its stake in TikTok or risk being banned in the US.
Sound familiar? That’s because two and a half years ago, former President Trump sent a very similar warning that ultimately went nowhere.
Bloomberg reporters Alex Barinka and Anna Edgerton join this episode to talk about this latest chapter in the standoff between the US government and TikTok. Plus, what a congressional hearing with TikTok’s CEO revealed about national security concerns surrounding the app.
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