US Senator Josh Hawley wants to ban TikTok nationwide

TikTok, whose parent is the Chinese company ByteDance, already faces a ban that would stop federal employees from using or downloading TikTok on government-owned devices.

“TikTok is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives. It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health,” he said on Twitter. “Now I will introduce legislation to ban it nationwide.”

Hawley did not say when the bill would be introduced.

TikTok said in a statement that Hawley was taking the wrong approach.

“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,” said spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter.

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“We hope that he will 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.”