Senator Tom Cotton demanded that President Biden open an investigation into Temu, the Chinese e-commerce platform, and clarify what legal authorities he would need from Congress to ban the app.
In a letter to Biden today, Cotton (R., Ark.) reiterated some of the long-standing concerns about Temu, including its alleged links to Uyghur forced labor and the questionable data-privacy practices of its parent company. It’s a bid to get the president to move toward a ban of the app.
“This malign app is a pipeline of dumped, counterfeit, and slave-labor products from China that is also gathering massive quantities of Americans’ personal data,” he wrote in the letter, obtained exclusively by National Review.
Since entering the U.S. market in 2022, Temu has rapidly established itself as a prominent e-commerce player — partly with the help of colorful commercials it ran during each of the two most recent Super Bowls.
It has also attracted the attention of China hawks on Capitol Hill, who have raised concerns about Temu’s use of a legal loophole that allows the tax-free import of packages if they are under $800. Packages that enter the U.S. under that rule therefore receive less scrutiny from Customs and Border Protection for compliance with laws prohibiting imports produced using forced labor.
Read the full story here.
