• TikTok app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken

TikTok app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken (Photo : REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)

Republican Senator Marco Rubio on Tuesday called on President Joe Biden to block short-form video app TikTok in the United States after China took an ownership stake in a key subsidiary of ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok.

The Biden administration in June withdrew a series of Trump-era executive orders that sought to ban new downloads of WeChat and TikTok.

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"Beijing's aggressiveness makes clear that the regime sees TikTok as an extension of the party-state, and the U.S. needs to treat it that way," Rubio said Tuesday.