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Biden admin mulling nationwide TikTok ban if Chinese parent company doesn’t divest
The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest itself of the popular social media platform, or it could face a possible nationwide ban, TikTok confirmed to CBS News on Wednesday.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) recently made the divestment ask, and a TikTok spokesperson did not dispute that account.
The Treasury Department, of which CFIUS is a part, declined to comment. The White House and National Security Council also declined to comment.
“If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn’t solve the problem,” TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan told CBS News in a statement.
“The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent, U.S.-based protection of U.S. user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification, which we are already implementing,” Shanahan added.
A spokesperson for TikTok also said that it was not exactly clear what divestment would actually look like, and that concrete details on this were not provided to the company. It was not clear if the company was given any sort of deadline.
TikTok, which is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance, has already been banned on federal government devices, including military devices, and more than half of U.S. states have banned the app on state government devices as well. There has been increasing bipartisan support for a full nationwide ban over possible national security concerns.
“TikTok is a modern-day Trojan horse of the [Chinese Communist Party], used to surveil and exploit Americans’ personal information,” Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in February. “It’s a spy balloon in your phone.”
In a letter to the CEOs of Apple and Google, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote in February, “Unlike most social media platforms, TikTok poses a unique concern because Chinese law obligates ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent company, to ‘support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work.'”
As CBS News has previously reported, TikTok, like many other tech companies, tracks users’ personal information, including phone numbers, email addresses, contacts and WiFi networks.
“We do have national security concerns,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said last year. “They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users.”
Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, told CBS News in December that the concern is overstated and “makes for good politics.” He said TikTok collects less data than other social media apps and is working to move user data to servers in the U.S., out of reach of China.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee later this month, and he is expected to face tough questioning over the company’s data collection and sharing procedures.
— Caitlin Yilek, Scott MacFarlane and Kathryn Watson contributed to this report.
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Charges against Georgia high school shooter’s dad echo precedent set in historic Crumbley case
(CBS DETROIT) – The father of the 14-year-old accused of killing two students and two teachers at a Georgia high school was charged in connection with the shooting. His charges follow in the wake of the convictions of two Michigan parents after a school shooting carried out by their child.
Colin Gray, 54, has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, in the shooting that happened at Apalachee High School Wednesday morning. The 14-year-old suspect was charged with four counts of felony murder.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said the charges come from Colin Gray “knowingly allowing his son to possess a weapon.” The father was in court Friday morning, where a judge told him he could face up to 180 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
The father of the shooting suspect being charged comes after the historic case of James and Jennifer Crumbley, who were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter, becoming the first parents in the U.S. to be convicted in a mass school shooting carried out by their child.
James and Jennifer Crumbley were held responsible for their roles in the Oxford High School shooting that killed four students — Justin Shilling, Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre and Hana St. Juliana — and injured seven other people on Nov. 30, 2021.
During their trials, the prosecution argued that the Crumbley parents ignored their son’s mental health needs and purchased the gun that he used in the shooting.
Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald, the prosecutor in the Crumbley case who set the precedent for prosecuting parents in mass school shootings, reacted to the news that the Georgia suspect’s father was charged in an interview with CNN Thursday.
“My reaction is rage because you know it the prosecution of the Crumbleys was never, ever meant to be a floodgate of charges against parents, because it was such an egregious set of facts,” said McDonald. “I share the emotions of the entire country that, even after that well-publicized case, we’re still here.”
Former federal prosecutor and defense attorney Rick Convertino, appearing on CBS News Detroit to discuss the shooting at Apalachee before it was revealed that the shooter’s father had been charged, noted the differences between the gun laws in Georgia and Michigan and claimed “gun culture” is different in Georgia than it is in Michigan. Georgia passed a law in 2022 that allowed residents to carry without a permit, which means adults do not need to have a permit to buy or carry buy rifles, shotguns or handguns.
One of the most significant differences, according to Convertino, is with the gun storage laws. “In Georgia, there’s no specific child-preventive act that requires the guns to be secured and safe from unrestricted children to have access to it,” said Convertino.
There is also no gun lock law in Georgia or any “red flag” laws that allow for the removal of guns from someone who is determined to be a risk for harming themselves or other people. Georgia’s laws are among the least strict in the nation, according to a CBS News analysis.
“We’ve seen this 14-year-old shooter had made threats a year before. The father apparently said to the police that he bought the AR-style weapon for a Christmas present for his minor child,” Kris Brown, president of gun control advocacy organization Brady, told CBS News’ Natalie Brand, drawing a parallel to the Crumbley case.
Brown said Colin Gray’s arrest and the convictions of James and Jennifer Crumbley send a message.
“If you have a firearm in the home, you better safely store that firearm, or you will have a risk if something happens of being criminally charged,” she said.
Michigan’s new gun safety laws went into effect in February, a little over two years after the Oxford High School shooting.
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