Gina Raimondo, who is in China this week, has said banning TikTok could “lose every voter under 35, forever.”
Despite the intense pressure on the popular short-form video app, which is owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, efforts to ban or regulate it in Washington have not yet borne fruit. And even with all that scrutiny, Ms. Raimondo is not planning to discuss TikTok while in China, a glaring omission that reflects the impasse at which it has left the Biden administration.
That has left the United States and TikTok to work out a plan for operating in America that addresses the national security concerns, but those talks have stalled amid growing tensions between the two superpowers.
Jodi Seth, a spokeswoman for TikTok, said the conversations with CFIUS were “ongoing.” A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which oversees CFIUS, declined to comment.
The White House has to tread carefully. Anupam Chander, a fellow at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard University, said targeting TikTok ran the risk of prompting blowback against American companies operating in China, such as Apple.
“The TikTok ban will beget other bans and start a digital trade war that is going to harm companies and users on both sides,” he said.
Mr. Chander also said that while TikTok attracted critics from both sides of the aisle, Democrats were more likely to benefit from the platform than Republicans ahead of the next election. He noted that the current administration had worked with TikTok stars to promote vaccines and said Republicans “are not using it as eagerly as the Democrats are.”
Federal judges ruled against President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to ban TikTok in 2020. The Biden administration has tried to navigate the issue in a way that could avoid a similar fate.
In March, the White House endorsed legislation written by Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, that would give the administration more power to regulate foreign services that collect Americans’ information.
“Today, we’re talking about TikTok,” he said. “But new apps and tools are popping up constantly.”
Category: Technology
Source: NYTimes Technology
