Report: China’s TikTok to Dump General Counsel Who Was Spearheading Legal Defense

China’s TikTok is reportedly set to remove its General Counsel, the executive responsible for convincing U.S. lawmakers that the social media platform controlled by a hostile foreign country has been doing enough to fend off national security concerns.

Erich Andersen, the U.S.-based TikTok’s General Counsel, is preparing to step down from his roll ahead of a high-stakes legal battle with the United States, sparked by the sell-or-ban legislation that is expected to become law within days, people familiar with the matter say, according to a report by Bloomberg.

TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek, meanwhile, said, “That is 100 percent false” after being asked to comment on whether the app is getting ready to remove Andersen from his current role.

For years, Andersen, who joined TikTok in 2020, has reportedly led talks with U.S. lawmakers trying to convince them that the Chinese social media company has been doing enough to prevent China from accessing U.S. user data or influencing what Americans see on their social media feeds, among other issues.

Those efforts, however, have clearly failed, given that the U.S. government has moved forward with bipartisan legislation that would ban the Chinese app in the United States unless its parent company ByteDance sells it within under a year.

As Breitbart News reported, this bill could become law within days, as the U.S. government is fast-tracking the TikTok sell-or-ban legislation by attaching it to the fleeting aid package for Ukraine and Israel. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has already said that he will sign the bill if it ends up on his desk.

The initiative to ban TikTok unless ByteDance sells it comes after years of concern over Chinese communists running a popular social media platform that has proven itself to be a danger for kids and teens, and whose parent company has already been caught snooping on journalists.

Moreover, TikTok is widely considered a national security threat, with lawmakers already having banned the Chinese app from U.S. government devices.

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