Biden administration ‘quietly’ circumnavigating own ban on TikTok: Report
The administration of US President Joe Biden is bypassing a looming ban it has imposed on Chinese-owned short-video application TikTok by secretly exempting State Department employees responsible for what it claims to be “public diplomacy.”
Ken Klippenstein, an investigative American journalist, citing an internal cable signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said that the ban on TikTok would not apply to "certain" US State Department employees.
Klippenstein said the Biden administration “quietly” exempted these personnel from the ban “regardless of any potential failure of TikTok to be divested of its foreign PRC [People’s Republic of China] ownership.”
The investigative journalist stressed that public diplomacy refers to US State Department messaging (i.e., propaganda) targeted at foreign audiences to “promote US interests abroad.”
“In other words, while the Biden administration is trying to ban Chinese-owned TikTok over concerns about foreign influence operations, the White House is quietly working to use TikTok for its own foreign influence activities,” he said.
“This is just one of a bundle of contradictions in the administration’s attempt to ban the app, not the least of which includes the fact that both the Biden and [Kamala] Harris campaigns aggressively used TikTok last year to reach millions of voters.”
The popular platform is owned by China-based ByteDance and has 7,000 employees in the US.
Biden had in April last year signed a law requiring Bytedance to sell its US assets by January 19, 2025 or face a nationwide ban.
Last week, the US Supreme Court seemed inclined to uphold the law despite calls from US President-elect Donald Trump and lawmakers to extend the January 19 deadline.
Trump, whose inauguration takes place the day after the law goes into effect, has said he should have time after taking office to pursue a "political resolution" to the issue.
If the court does not block the law by Sunday, new TikTok downloads on Apple (AAPL.O) or Google (GOOGL.O) app stores would be banned but existing users could continue to access the application for some time.
The platform's services would degrade and eventually stop working because other companies would be barred from providing support to TikTok.
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