US Senators move bill to ban federal employees from using TikTok

Two US Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Rick Scott introduced a bill to ban federal employees from usingChinese social media app TikTok citing "security risk".

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"TikTok is owned by a Chinese company that includes Chinese Communist Party members on its board, and it is required by law to share user data with Beijing," Senator Hawley said, adding," as many of our federal agencies have already recognized, TikTok is a major security risk to the United States, and it has no place on government devices."

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Last week during a Senate hearing, US officials including the FBI, USJustice Department and Homeland Security had said that the Chinese app could become a tool to be exploited by Chinese intelligence services.

A California college student had earlier accused the video-sharing app of transferring private user data to servers in China in a lawsuit. According to the filing, the app had allegedly transferred user data to two servers in China bugly.qq.com, and umeng.com in April 2019.

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According to reports, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States had opened a national security review of TikTok. The US government believes the app is being used as a tool of espionage.

In November last year, the US government had launched a national security review of TikTok owner ByteDance Technology's $1 billion acquisition of US social media app Musical.ly.

As the Senators set the US bill in motion, TikTok said it was opening a "Transparency Center" at the company's Los Angeles office in a bid to boost transparency.

"This new facility in our LA office will provide outside experts with an opportunity to directly view how our teams at TikTok go about the day-to-day challenging, but critically important, work of moderating content on the platform," the company said in a statement.

"The Transparency Center will open in early May with an initial focus on TikTok's content moderation. Later, we will expand the centre to include insight into our source code, and our efforts around data privacy and security," it added.