The Biden government said on Wednesday that it was reviewing former President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban TikTok in the US as the Chinese-owned video app continued negotiations on its future.
Attorneys for the Department of Justice said in a court case that the new government has begun investigating whether TikTok is the threat to national security that Trump has alleged.
The former president has issued several executive orders that would prevent Americans from gaining access to TikTok, but the efforts have attracted legal challenges and have yet to take effect.
In the court documents, the Department of Justice singled out the rules of the Department of Commerce and issued an executive order restricting the new downloads of TikTok from Apple and Google’s app stores.
The Department of Commerce “plans to conduct an evaluation of the underlying record that justifies the ban.
Attorneys for the Department of Justice have asked two judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals to stick with the review of previous rulings that put the restrictions in effect. ” An overview of the ban in question here could limit matters, or eliminate the need for this court’s review altogether, ” they said.
The move is the latest development in a controversial and protracted debate over TikTok’s presence in the US and its ownership structure. The U.S. Foreign Investment Committee, or Cfius, last year ordered TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the app, as well as push through executive orders to close the app.
Trump originally gave his blessing to a preliminary agreement that would create a new U.S. headquarters called TikTok Global, with Oracle overseeing U.S. user data and taking a stake in the company along with other U.S. investors.
Both parties later challenged the terms of the agreement, by reprimanding Trump and leaving the negotiations in limbo while the former president drew his attention to the US presidential election campaign.
The Biden government has made it clear that it will review all China-related actions taken by Trump during his last term, including those related to TikTok.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that the administration comprehensively assesses any risk to U.S. data from U.S. citizens, including TikTok users. Psaki said there is an ongoing and ‘strict’ Cfius process regarding the app.
TikTok said it does not share US user data with the Chinese government. ByteDance declined to comment on Wednesday’s court documents.
A deadline for ByteDance to restructure TikTok’s U.S. operations in December was passed without a resolution, although people in the discussions at the time said the committee did not intend to take immediate action against the Chinese company.
Biden has indicated that he will maintain a hawkish stance on China over everything from Beijing’s efforts to quell the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong to the repression of Uighurs in the northwestern Xinjiang region.
However, the government was less clear about how it would evaluate technological issues affecting US national security, and stressed that it was pursuing an ‘patience’ approach when formulating policy.