TikTok Wins a Vote in South Dakota

The vote provides TikTok an early, albeit small, legislative victory as politicians and governors transfer to enact restrictions—or threaten to take action—throughout the nation. TikTok has roughly 100 million American customers, lots of them younger. That recognition threatens to broaden the general public debate over strikes to limit it past the national-security issues that many American officers have raised in regards to the Chinese language-owned app.

Fast Metropolis, inhabitants 76,000, took up the TikTok matter at Tuesday’s city-council assembly.

TikTok nonetheless faces a lot larger challenges in Washington. Some officers within the Biden administration need to attempt to power TikTok’s proprietor, Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., to promote the app to a U.S. firm. And a bipartisan group of Congress members have launched a invoice that may ban TikTok for all People, not simply public servants with authorities units.

The officers pushing for a pressured sale or ban say the Chinese language authorities may order TikTok to gather information on People or to affect what movies People watch on the app. TikTok says it might refuse such an order.

In Fast Metropolis, Councilman Jason Salamun stated he launched the proposal for the city-government ban after watching federal leaders and the South Dakota governor take comparable motion. “If a couple of menace, and also you don’t deliver it ahead, it might be negligent,” Mr. Salamun, a possible candidate within the metropolis’s mayoral election in June, stated Wednesday. ​Mr. Salamun was the only council member who voted in help of the ban.

Amongst these opposing the proposed ban was Councilwoman Laura Armstrong, a declared mayoral candidate. She obtained an evaluation from cybersecurity researchers from the Web Governance Venture, which is a part of the Georgia Institute of Expertise’s public-policy faculty. The group describes itself as impartial. The report concluded that TikTok didn’t pose a critical safety menace. Different researchers have reached the other conclusion.

Ms. Armstrong shared the report with fellow council members, together with Ritchie Nordstrom. He stated he spent hours researching the subject and reached the identical conclusion.

“We simply stored coming again to: ‘There’s no proof on this,’ ” Ms. Armstrong stated. “I’m not an enormous fan of the Chinese language authorities, however to get sucked into what I deem as media McCarthyism just isn’t the precise factor.”

Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com