A push to ban TikTok in the U.S. picked up more supporters on Tuesday, with the Biden White House and a bipartisan group of 12 senators offering their endorsements. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the latest bipartisan bill that would block TikTok, called the RESTRICT Act, will help “address the threats we face today, and also prevent such risks from arising in the future.”
“We look forward to continue working with both Democrats and Republicans on this bill, and urge Congress to act quickly to send it to the President’s desk,” Sullivan said in a statement issued by the White House. During a news conference on Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and other senators emphasized that their RESTRICT Act isn’t just about blocking TikTok, but rather it’s about having a broad strategy to protect national security. “Instead of playing whack-a-mole on Huawei one day, ZTE
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the next, Kaspersky, TikTok — we need a more comprehensive approach to evaluating and mitigating the threats posed by these foreign technologies from these adversarial nations,” said Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. He had said Sunday that his bill would be coming this week. “We’ve got 12 senators at this point as initial co-sponsors, and I can assure you we’ve sparked a lot of interest from other senators, as well as from a number of our friends in the House on both the Republican and Democratic sides,” Virginia’s senior senator added. The measure would …