Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) exhorted Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to force the divestment of TikTok from ByteDance, its Chinese parent company.
ByteDance, which is located in Beijing, has been accused of maintaining close ties with the Chinese Communist Party. Blumenthal and Moran suggested in a Thursday letter to Yellen that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a board composed of nine cabinet-level officials charged with reviewing the national security implications of foreign investments into American companies, should compel ByteDance to jettison operations for TikTok within the United States.
“TikTok, which collects the sensitive information of tens of millions of American users and plays an increasing role in our society, is well within the scope of CFIUS’s national security mandate,” the lawmakers contended. The letter referenced CFIUS requiring that Beijing Kunlun Company divest itself of LGBTQ dating site Grindr and healthcare platform PatientsLikeMe four years ago under the Trump administration. Read more…