A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee is pushing Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores because of national security concerns as the Chinese-owned company faces escalating prospects of a national ban amid bipartisan scrutiny of its data-sharing practices.

In a letter addressed to the chief executives of Apple and Alphabet, Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. says TikTok’s popularity “raises the obvious risk that the Chinese Communist Party could weaponize TikTok against the United States” by forcing parent company ByteDance to “surrender Americans’ sensitive data or manipulate the content Americans receive to advance China’s interests.”

The government has increasingly been taking action against TikTok’s ties to China. In December, President Joe Biden signed a bill prohibiting the use of TikTok by nearly four million government employees on devices owned by its agencies. At least 27 state governments have passed similar measures.

There’s no evidence that the Chinese government has demanded American user data from TikTok or its parent company or influenced the content users see on the platform.

In a statement, TikTok said that the Bennet “relies almost exclusively on misleading reporting about TikTok, the data we collect, and our data security controls.” It added that the letter ignored its investment in a plan, known as Project Texas, to “provide additional assurances to our community about their data security and the integrity of the TikTok platform.”

Mirroring concerns made in a letter from a Federal Communications commissioner to Apple and Google in June, Bennett stresses TikTok’s data harvesting practices. He says its reach “allows it to amass extensive data on the American people, including device information, search and viewing history, message content, IP addresses, faceprints and voiceprints.” Unlike other tech companies that harvest similar data, he claims TikTok “poses a unique concern” because its obligated under Chinese law to cooperate with state intelligence work.

TikTok has over 100 million active users. Roughly 36 percent of Americans over 12 use the platform, spending over 80 minutes per day on the app — more than Facebook and Instagram combined. In November, TikTok confirmed that China-based employees could gain remote access to European user data. Reporting by BuzzFeed News has also revealed that company employees in China had access to US user data.

The data TikTok collects can be leveraged by the Chinese government to advance Chinese interests, according to the letter. It may be forced, for example, to tweak its algorithm to boost content that undermines U.S. democratic institutions or “muffle criticisms of CCP policy toward Hong Kong, Taiwan, or its Uighur population.”

According to Pew survey in 2022, a third of TikTok’s adult users report that they regularly access news from the app. Forbes has reported on the ability of TikTok staff to “secretly handpick videos and supercharge their distribution, using a practice known internally as heating.”

To curb criticism of its data-sharing practices, TikTok has announced a partnership with Oracle to move its data on U.S. users stored on foreign servers to Texas. The project also includes audits of its algorithms and creating a subsidiary called TikTok US Data Security to oversee content moderation policies and approve editorial decisions. U.S. employees will report to an independent board of directors.

The US Committee on Foreign Investment, which reviews business dealing that may be a threat to national sceurity, is reviewing ByteDance’s 2017 merger of TikTok and Musical.ly. It may force TikTok to sell to a US company, harkening back to when former President Donald Trump issued in 2020 an executive order demanding ByteDance to divest ownership of the app (the order was blocked by a federal court). Scrutiny of TikTok quieted when Biden took office, but the company continued to run into legal trouble over data-sharing practices. In 2021, TikTok agreed to pay $92 million to settle lawsuits alleging that the app clandestinely transferred to servers in China vast quantities of user data on children.

Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University who was briefed by TikTok about Project Texas, says the U.S. banning TikTok may “embolden other governments to do the same to apps and services from the U.S.” He adds, “It’s not clear to me that anything short of a sale will satisfy TikTok’s critics.”

TikTok’s chief executive Shou Zi Chew will appear before a House committee in March.

This article originally appeared in THR.com.

Nick Carter is hitting back against a lawsuit that claims he raped a 17-year-old girl on his tour bus in 2001 following a Backstreet Boys concert in Tacoma, Wash.

In a countersuit filed in Nevada court Thursday (Feb. 2), the singer claims he’s the victim of a “five-year conspiracy” orchestrated by three individuals “to harass, defame and extort” him by latching onto the #MeToo movement. Among other allegations, Carter says the alleged victim of the assault, Shannon “Shay” Ruth, was manipulated into filing her lawsuit by Melissa Schuman Henschel — a former member of the teen-pop group Dream, who previously accused Carter of assaulting her in 2003 when she was 18 years old — and Schuman’s father, Jerome Schuman.

“Ruth was a vulnerable and highly impressionable individual, craving attention and desperate to fit in,” the lawsuit reads. “Schuman and Jerome groomed and coached Ruth, coaxing her to inflate her initial claim of being abused at the hands of a third-party, to being physically abused at the specific hands of Carter, and, finally, to being sexually assaulted by Carter.” The countersuit goes on to highlight the evolving nature of Ruth’s claims against Carter in social media posts as well as “numerous factual changes and amendments” made to her initial police report against him over a period of 12 months.

In addition to claims that the co-defendants illegally conspired against him, Carter accuses the defendants of defamation owing to various social media posts and a podcast appearance in which they variously accused him of being “a rapist,” an “abuser,” a “#SerialPredator” and more.

Also named as a defendant is the holder of the @ElaineModo Twitter handle (under the name Olay Elaine Mcintosh) — though the countersuit alleges that the account is likely orchestrated by the Schumans and Ruth to spread false information about him from a source designed to appear independent.

Carter is asking for damages of no less than $2.35 million — the amount he claims he lost in various career opportunities — as well as emotional distress damages, punitive damages and more.

In an emailed statement sent to Billboard, Ruth’s attorney, Mike Boskovich of Corsiglia McMahon & Allard, said: “Why should Nick Carter be believed with his long history of abusing females. A jury will weigh the evidence and decide.”

One particularly eyebrow-raising allegation in the countersuit involves Carter’s late brother, singer Aaron Carter, whom Nick alleges the Schumans and Ruth used as a pawn to try to “legitimize” their claims against his older brother. “The Schumans’ timing couldn’t have been better since, at the time, Aaron was addicted to drugs, battling serious mental health issues, and engaged in a misguided campaign of retaliation against Carter and other members of his family who were worried about Aaron and pushing him to seek professional help,” the complaint reads. It adds that the Schumans went so far as to accompany Aaron to a court hearing after a restraining order application was filed against him by Nick and his wife following a series of threatening social media posts by the younger Carter.

The countersuit notes that Aaron later recanted his previous statements backing up the women’s claims on Instagram and during a subsequent podcast appearance, but that the Schumans and Ruth continue to use those earlier statements to try to lend credibility to their claims.

In the wake of Melissa Schuman’s initial allegations against Carter in November 2017, the singer claims that, in addition to career and financial blowback, he has become the target of death threats and been forced to hire private security for himself and his family. He alleges that he and the Backstreet Boys were dealt an even costlier financial blow after Ruth filed her lawsuit last December, losing at least $2.35 million due to the cancellation of promotional events, contracts and endorsement deals with companies including MeUndies, VRBO, Roblox and ABC, which scrapped the group’s A Very Backstreet Christmas Special due to air on the network after Ruth’s lawsuit was filed.

Though named as a co-defendant, throughout the filing Ruth is depicted as little more than a pawn in a game designed to bring the Schumans wealth and attention. The countersuit paints Melissa specifically as a desperate fame-seeker who is using the allegations against Carter to revive her dormant career as a singer and actress. Jerome, meanwhile, is characterized as akin to an attack dog, regularly making “aggressive, nasty, and, often, threatening” statements on social media against Carter and his fans.

The lengthy countersuit includes a detailed account of Ruth and Melissa Schuman’s inconsistent statements since making their accusations and attempts to discredit them by noting that they waited 19 and 14 years, respectively, before going public about the alleged assaults. “Upon information and belief, Schuman and Ruth deliberately waited for the applicable limitation periods to run so as to allow evidence to spoil, witnesses to die or disappear, and memories to fade in an effort to evade any thorough investigation into their false claims,” the countersuit reads.

With respect to Ruth’s claims, the countersuit alleges that no autograph signing event was held outside Carter’s tour bus on the night in question, as she claimed in her lawsuit, and includes evidence that after going to the Tacoma police nearly 20 years later, Ruth continually contradicted important details in her account — including an initial claim that Carter had only “injured her arm.”

In further denying Melissa Schuman’s claims, Carter alleges that, far from a rape, the two engaged in consensual sex on the night in question. After highlighting Schuman’s prior statements that she tried to avoid the singer in the wake of the alleged rape, the countersuit adds that she not only completed work on the movie they were filming together after the alleged assault but recorded a duet with Carter and later performed it live with him. It also points to various supportive social media posts Schuman made about Carter as recently as May 2017.

You can read the full lawsuit below.