The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to vote next month on a bill aimed at blocking use of China’s popular social media app TikTok in the United States, the committee confirmed on Friday.
The measure, planned by panel chairman Michael McCaul, a Republican, would aim to give the White House the legal tools to ban it tick tock on US national security concerns.
“The concern is that this app gives the Chinese government a backdoor into our phones,” McCaul told Bloomberg News, which previously reported the voting timing.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump tried to block new users from downloading TikTok and ban other transactions that would have effectively blocked use of the app in the United States, but lost a series of court battles over the measure.
The Biden administration officially abandoned those efforts in June 2021. Then, in December, Republican Senator Marco Rubio introduced bipartisan legislation banning TikTok, which would also block all transactions by social media companies in or under the influence of China and Russia.
But a ban on the short video app owned by ByteDance and is popular with teenagers, would face significant hurdles in Congress and would require 60 votes in the Senate.
For three years, TikTok – which has more than 100 million US users – has been trying to reassure Washington that US citizens’ personal information is not accessible and its content is not being tampered with by the Chinese Communist Party or anyone else under Beijing’s influence be able.
TikTok said on Friday “the call for a total ban on TikTok takes a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broader industry issues such as data security, privacy and online harm.”
The US government’s Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), a powerful national security agency, ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020 over concerns that US user data could be leaked to the Chinese government.
CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks since 2021 with the aim of reaching a national security agreement to protect the data of US TikTok users.
TikTok said it has a “comprehensive package of measures, involving levels of government and independent oversight, to ensure there are no backdoors in TikTok that could be used to manipulate the platform,” and has invested around $1.5 billion (approx Rs.12,300 crore). these efforts.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment on the bill on Friday. “It’s under review by (CFIUS), so I’m just not going to go into detail,” Jean-Pierre said.
Last month, Biden signed legislation banning federal employees from using or downloading TikTok on state-owned devices. More than 25 US states have also banned the use of TikTok on state-owned devices.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
