Two members of the House of Representatives are urging ESPN to drop TikTok after the social media platform sponsored halftime shows during recent college football bowl games broadcast on the sports television network.

Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) sent a letter to ESPN CEO James Pitaro on Monday.

“The U.S. government considers TikTok a national security threat because it is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, which is subject to the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” the House members wrote.

“We are concerned that despite these widely known issues with the app, ESPN has allowed TikTok to sponsor NCAA bowl game halftime shows,” they added.

The letter requested answers about what vetting procedures ESPN uses when reviewing potential corporate sponsors of its programming.

Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi asked if ESPN was “aware that TikTok is, through ByteDance, effectively controlled by the CCP and that the U.S. government has determined that it is a national security threat?”

The lawmakers concluded by challenging ESPN to commit to ending its commercial relationship with TikTok, ByteDance, and other Chinese companies determined by the U.S. government to pose national security threats.

TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps in the U.S., with more than 100 million users. The national security concerns, however, have led to a growing number of restrictions and bans from lawmakers.

At least 15 states have banned the download and use of TikTok on state-issued devices over data privacy and national security concerns. Both New Jersey and Ohio joined the growing movement over the past week, showing that the anxiety is held by states led by Republican and Democratic governors.

Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said in his executive order, “these surreptitious data privacy and cybersecurity practices pose national and local security and cybersecurity threats to users of these applications and platforms and the devices storing the applications and platforms.”

In addition, the app was banned on devices issued by the federal government as part of the $1.7 trillion spending passed in December. The “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” was introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) in the Senate.

“TikTok is a Trojan Horse for the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a major security risk to the United States, and until it is forced to sever ties with China completely, it has no place on government devices,” Hawley said in a statement in December. “States across the U.S. are banning TikTok on government devices. It’s time for Joe Biden and the Democrats to help do the same.”

The Daily Wire reported that Seattle Public School District officials filed a lawsuit on Friday against social media platform owners, including TikTok, for fueling a youth mental health crisis.

The lawsuit argued that students experiencing mental health issues perform worse in school and are less likely to attend class, which “directly affects Seattle Public School’s ability to fulfill its educational mission.”

The FBI denied a request to make public any payments it may have made to Google or Meta because such records could reveal protected information about law enforcement.

The FBI was recently revealed to have paid the social media company Twitter $3.4 million to process requests for information on or censorship of numerous accounts on the platform. Through a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request, The Daily Wire sought similar records of payments the agency may have made to Meta, which controls Facebook and Instagram, and Google, which controls YouTube.

“The FBI can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records responsive to your request pursuant to FOIA Exemption (b)(7)(E) [5 U.S.C.§552 (b)(7)(E)]. The nature of your request implicates records the FBI may or may not compile for law enforcement purposes,” the FBI told The Daily Wire Monday in a written response to a December 20 FOIA request.

“Please be advised per standard FBI practice and policy this response neither confirms nor denies the existence of any records which would disclose techniques, procedures, or guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions and risk circumvention of the law by FOIA Exemption (b)(7)(E) [5 U.S.C.§552 (b)(7)(E)]. Therefore, your request is being administratively closed,” the FBI said.

A slate of communications and records from Twitter released by its new head, Elon Musk, revealed that the FBI had a relationship with the social media giant that developed into a partnership in which the agency would pay the company to process requests for censorship and information on certain social media accounts.

One message from February 2021 said that the FBI paid Twitter millions of dollars in compensation for the time the company’s staff spent processing the FBI’s myriad requests.

“In 2019 [Twitter’s Safety, Content, & Law Enforcement team] instituted a reimbursement program for our legal process response from the FBI. Prior to the start of the program, Twitter chose not to collect under this statutory right of reimbursement for the time spent processing requests from the FBI,” the email said. “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”

The FBI’s relationship with the company influenced the platform’s censorship decisions at a high level. For instance, Twitter’s former head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, testified in December 2020 that the FBI and other members of the U.S. Intelligence Community had primed Twitter to watch out for alleged “hack-and-leak operations” by the state actors, namely Russia, ahead of the release of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made similar claims in an appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” in August.

“The FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically There’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that,’” Zuckerberg said.

The New York Post dropped a story on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020 which was subsequently censored or suppressed on Twitter and Facebook. One of the largest proponents for censoring the story inside Twitter was the company’s deputy general counsel James Baker, who joined the social media platform after a stint as the FBI’s general counsel.

Roth eventually made the call to censor the Biden laptop story after rounds of internal debate. “The suggestion from experts – which rings true – is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware,” Roth said in an email.